A Few Bugs in the System

Rooms and offices were chosen, much of the required staff was hired, and the final pieces of equipment had been installed as the day of the grand opening of the AzTech Pyramid neared. Tomorrow would see the big media extravaganza that Aztech was throwing in the atrium lobby for the opening of the building and the relocating of the corporate HQ to floors 51-65, to be immediately followed by the Vanguard’s first official press conference in their own new base of operations.

After a late-morning meeting with Álvaro to go over and sign the final lease agreement and special covenants for the top floors, the billionaire had left for a staff meeting with his department heads, while the members of the Vanguard had scattered to their individual interests. Jonny, Roland and Chuck, having just that morning finally got Jonny’s X-Station 5 hooked up to the big screen in the cinema room, began what promised to be an epic session of Destiny. Artemis and JJ met in his office to go over the final candidates for the base’s Head of Security once more, while Kyle returned to his newly installed physics lab to finish calibrating the more sensitive equipment. Cooper returned to his room to call Meg and tell her the group had agreed she could have the exclusive on the first tour of the new HQ that evening… although she couldn’t print until after the press conference, of course. He then continued his intense studying of the legal guidelines and official protocols which SHADE had sent over with their security clearances the week before.

It  came as something of a surprise, about two hours later, when JJ received a call fromÁlvaro asking him to gather the whole team in the Danger Room (as Jonny had taken to calling it, apparently from something in one of his favorite comic books; Artemis kept insisting Simulation Chamber was more accurate, and less fanciful) at 15:00, in full uniforms.

“It’s a surprise!” was all the man would say when JJ pressed him for an explanation. So it was curious group that filed into the large open space on the 79th floor that afternoon. Álvaro stood in the center of the room toward the back, dressed in a dazzling white suit with a vest of iridescent purple and deep purple tie, a far cry from the elegant but very professional dark suit he’d been wearing earlier.

As the massive double doors slid shut and sealed with a hiss behind the group, Álvaro grinned and raised his hands, as if preparing to give a benediction. A wide grin split his face. “Thanks you all so much for coming… and now, let the games begin!”

“That is not de la Vega,” Artemis said, suddenly tensing. But even as she spoke the figure of the billionaire shimmered, digitized, and vanished as silently as a soap bubble.

“A hologram!” Chuck exclaimed, stating the obvious. “Cool!”

At that moment half a dozen panels opened in the walls around the room and  mobile weapons platforms darted out, while the lights increased to maximum illumination. While the others stood looking around in confusion, Artemis drew her escrima sticks and sprang forward as silvery coils of  metal shot out from the nearest hovering drone to immobilize her. Twisting aside, she deftly avoided their grasp, and her own hurled weapons wedged into an open port and smashed the optical sensor – when the sticks discharged their electrical blast, the drone shuddered, sparked, and crashed to the deck in a smoking pile of junk.

Simultaneously, another platform blasted Scion in the chest with a series of laser pulses, the ruby energy reflecting off his bronze and silver armor, to dissipate harmlessly. A Taser cannon fired at Phantom Ace, taking him completely by surprise – unable to phase in time, the electrical charge staggered him and he dropped to his knees, dazed. A flame thrower blasted a line of flames at Chilz, whose immense icy form just seemed to shrug off the heat without apparent effect, while coil launchers targeted Totem and Quanta. The first set missed the shaman entirely as he calmly stepped aside, while the second set wrapped tightly around Quanta – who shrugged his shoulders and expanded his carbon shell, tearing the metal coils in half. And as the pieces hit the deck Jonny started to reach down for the trigger that would ignite his flames, only to stagger forward at a Taser cannon blast took him in the back.

As the others slowly came to realize that something was wrong – with the exception of Chilz, who continued to think it was all just some cool surprise training session – Artemis retrieved her escrima sticks from the wreckage of the first drone, then leaping into the air drove them into the shell of another, bringing it, too, down in smoking ruin. “The weapons take 10 to 12 seconds to recharge between attacks!” she called out, turning to seek her next target.

Chilz aimed a hand at the drone nearest him at loosed a blast of ice shards toward it. The steel-like ice pierced the armor of the floating weapons platform, making it look like an ice sculpture of a cyborg porcupine. It wobbled, then crashed to the deck, where it shuddered once and died.

Realizing that something was seriously wrong, Scion dashed to a nearby section of wall that he knew contained control elements for the room. Ripping the access panel off, he began working at the glowing power conduits within. Phantom Ace, staggering back to his feet nearby and trying to shake off his dizziness, realized at once what his teammate was trying to do. But it would be quicker to do it from the control room, surely…

“Do you trust me?” he asked Scion, laying a hand on his shoulder.

“What? Yes, I suppose,” the engineer said absently, focused on his work. “Why–”

Phantom Ace focused his power and willed them both into the Danger Room’s control center on the floor below them –

– and felt like he’d been rammed into a wall of rubber at about 90 miles per hour. Already dazed, the feedback stunned him and he collapsed to the floor, barely conscious. Scion felt the feedback as well, but his armor shielded him from the worst of it. A quick check to see that the younger man was alive was all he could spare, however, as the weapons platforms continued to attack the others – and with increasing intensity. Shaking his head in frustration he turned back to the access panel.

As he worked to short circuit the whole system, Quanta began to throw up a carbon-fiber shield around him, one large enough to hold the whole group. Leaving gaps for Artemis and Blue Flame, who remained out of range, he called his nearer teammates to him…

As more attack drones popped out of the walls to bolster their dwindling brothers, the power of the attacks was definitely increasing. Blue Flame, after talking out one platform with a blast of searing plasma, actually felt the laser pulses from a second one that flashed through his form seconds later. The red energy interacted with his blue plasma to create a purple light show that did some, admittedly minor, damage – but he worried what would happen if they got more powerful… time to get behind Quanta’s wall!

As the shield grew in size and began to arc overhead to complete the dome, Totem’s mystic bolts took out one platform, but did nothing to shield him from the coils that nearly immobilized him. Bruised, he managed to wriggle free, and then blast the coils to pieces.

Blue Flame and Chilz shot bolts of fire and ice that took out one drone but missed another, and the former finally joined the latter within the closing dome. Artemis rolled in a second later, dispatching another weapons platform on the way, and Quanta sealed them in.

“Almost there,” Scion muttered, more to himself than the others. One more cross connection to this fiber-optic cable… reroute that signal booster… and…

“Done!” he cried in triumph, looking up at last and finally noticing the silvery dome around them all. “Nice touch, Quanta, thanks for keeping the damn things off me! I shut them down, it should be safe now…”

They all listened for any sound from beyond the dome, but there was only silence. After a quick glance at Artemis and Scion to see that they were all in agreement, Quanta dropped his shield. As the matter faded back into the quantum foam from whence it came they could all see that the system had indeed been shut down – fully intact but inactive weapons platforms were scattered across the room’s decking between the still-smoldering husks of their shattered brethren.

“What the hell was that all about,” Scion wondered, helping a still dazed but quickly recovering Phantom Ace to his feet.

“I don’t know,” Quanta replied, “but Álvaro has some explaining to do. I really don’t appreciate being pulled away from my work for some asinine practical joke, if that’s what this was.”

“I do not know what is going on either,” Artemis said, stooping to examine one of the destroyed drones. ‘But if I’m reading these setting correctly, all of the safeties were off. This was no joke, and no mere surprise training session.”

“Well, I agree that Álvaro needs to explain himself,” Scion agreed, heading for the doors with Totem and Chilz close on his heels. He punched in the code to open the door, but nothing happened. “What the hell? I didn’t override the door or the environmental systems, just the weapons systems. Why isn’t it opening?”

“I’ll ‘port down to the control center and see if I can open the door from there,” Phantom Ace volunteered. But once again he was stunned by whatever was preventing his teleportation power. “Well shit, I guess the teleport barrier isn’t tied into the weapons systems, huh?

“No, I’ll be fine,” he said as others helped him to his feet. He shook his head to clear it. “I’m a superhero, we recover quick, right? But jeez, what else could go wrong?”

As if in answer to his question the air suddenly shimmered around them, and the Vanguard suddenly found themselves standing in a large parking lot. The big box structure of a Wall-Mart rose several hundred feet away, and for a disorienting moment he wondered if they’d been teleported – the time of day looked right, but…

“A holographic recreation of the Wall-Mart property in the Bethlehem Flats section of the city,” Artemis called from the center of the room. She turned to scan their new surroundings. The parking lot was less than half full, and there was no sign of people or traffic anywhere. “I think–”

She was cut off as another shimmer in the air suddenly revealed six figures about a hundred feet north of her. Five were clearly humanoid robots, and aggressively military ones at that – almost eight feet tall, armored in white, with what looked like heavy calibre weapons built into their massive forearms. Behind the screen of robots stood another metallic figure, slightly smaller and to her trained eye obviously a man in full body armor.

Startled noises from behind her caused Artemis to turn for a quick look – an identical group, save that these were black, had appeared not twenty feet from her teammates gathered near the door. Or rather where the door had been. Something about these figures struck a familiar chord in her mind… the symbol on the thorax carapaces of the robots and on the chests of the knights… knights! That was it, they looked like –

“These are not holograms!” she called out to the others, springing aside to avoid a barrage of high-calibre rounds fired from the robots – Pawns – ahead of her. “This is an attack, act accordingly!”

The Pawns in front of Quanta suddenly unloaded scores of rounds into him at almost point-blank range. His quantum matter shell cracked and healed, cracked and healed, but held. The force of the attack pushed him back, however, leaving him slightly dazed and off balance. Before he could recover, the armored man behind the robots blasted him with some sort of gatling laser – a rapid stream of green energy pulses burst off his shell, keeping him on the defensive.

The white-armored man with Artemis‘ grouping – a Knight – fired his own gatling laser at her, and she leapt and jinked to avoid the emerald pulses. At the same time the white Pawns had all fired clusters of Taser darts. Each swarm had a dozen slivers of electrified metal, and she turned and twirled in a seemingly effortless dance that avoided them all… all except one, which tagged her left arm. The jolt was no more than an annoyance, but it sparked her anger – the escrima sticks flew at the white Knight. He staggered back, but was clearly unhurt, and her weapons now lay on the ground between him and his robotic Pawns.

Scion was momentarily torn between which teammate to aid, but Quanta yelled out “Leave this bunch to me!” so he leapt forward to hurl his tangle field at two of the Pawns menacing Artemis. The energy grid fully engulfed one robot, which shuddered and smoked under the charge, collapsing to the ground, inert. But the second one only caught the edge of the field, and though it staggered, it quickly recovered.

Quanta, reeling under another barrage of laser pulses from the black Knight and repeated high-calibre hits from the Pawns, still managed to throw up a quantum-matter shield between himself and the invaders. In the respite this gave him he quickly extended the carbon fiber construct to encase all of his opponents within a dome.

“Focus on the white group,” he called to his companions. “We’ll take them out first, then deal with these!” Matching action to words he began running toward the white group.

At about that time Phantom Ace, who had noticed Artemis‘ weapons of choice laying on the ground out of her reach, decided to teleport in and grab them for her. Perhaps fooled by the illusion of the hologram, or still woozy from his earlier damage, or more likely a combination of both, he forgot about the teleport inhibitor field – and laid himself out on the deck, once again semi-conscious.

Artemis, meanwhile, had not let the absence of her escrima sticks slow her down – ripping a bumper from the front of a holographic truck, she hurled it at a Pawn. The force field construct seemed as good as solid matter, knocking the robot back and sending its bullets skyward. The stream of lead passed through the Blue Flame, vaporizing as they did so, and a moment later the robot itself disintegrated in a ball of blue plasma.

Scion blew another robot apart with a round of armor-piecing rounds, and followed that up with a similar barrage at the white Knight. The rounds dented and cracked the armor, but the Knight rolled away before his defenses could be fully compromised. He quickly launched his own attack at the flying hero, knocking him back but doing no real damage to the superior armor.

Artemis took advantage of the Knight’s forced move to roll in and scoop up her escrima sticks, then whirled about to leap over the Pawn that had been tracking her movements, waiting for its shot. Coming down on its back, she jammed the sticks into each side of its neck and triggered the electric burst. The robot shuddered and shook, sparks flying and smoke rising from its joints, then collapsed in a tangle of dead limbs.

The last Pawn reached for her as she leapt off the dead form of its brother, and she grasped a metallic wrist, pivoting around to land on her feet and then using her momentum to hurl the automaton into the back of the Knight. He staggered away quickly enough, but before the robot could make it back to its feet it was pierced by half dozen spears of green ice that pinned it to the ground as the light in its electronic eyes dimmed and died.

With a grin Chilz turned from the dead robot and hurled a similar flight of deadly ice at the Knight, only to see him knock the barrage aside, shattering the spikes into sparkling shards. Then the Ice Elemental focused his will on the air around the embattled villain, bringing the temperature down to sub-Arctic levels in a matter of seconds. Thick frost began to form on the white armor – until a lance of blue plasma shot down from above, turning it to steam. In an instant a spiderweb of cracks snaked across the Knight’s shell.

Totem had earlier attempted to use his spell of Sleeping Mists on both the Knight and his Pawns, only to see it fail – the robots had no sentient minds to effect, and the Knight was protected in his sealed environment. But now the shaman saw his moment to act, and he did so. With the white Knight reeling and his armor damaged from bullets, ice and fire, Totem chanted out the incantation for the spell of Baleful Bindings… violet strands of energy flowed out from his gesturing hands and quickly twined and twisted themselves around the armored figure. In seconds his arms were bound to his sides and his legs solidly entwined – the Knight toppled over onto his back, struggling to no avail against the mystic bonds.

“Good work,” Artemis said, startling the shaman, though he hid it quickly. By all the Great Beasts, how did she do that? It was full daylight and he could’ve sworn she – he shook off the thought and focused on what she was saying. “I’ve seen something like this before – an organization called the Chessmen. It was a clandestine intelligence organization dedicated to espionage and blackmail in pursuit of the usual goals of such groups – political ascendancy and eventual world domination.

“But it was destroyed 30 years ago by the joint efforts of SHADE and the original Raptor… with a little help from me, mostly on the intelligence gathering side of things. Godwin Kaspar, the founder of the group and its ‘Black King,’ went to prison, as did all his followers who weren’t killed. I heard he died in prison five years later –”

As she spoke Artemis had been leading the group quickly back toward the silvery dome Quanta had erected over the black group of Chessmen, and now they all stopped as cracks appeared all across one side of the construct. “But I have no idea who could have resurrected and upgraded the organization,” she hastily concluded as the quantum shell exploded outward, “but clearly someone has.”

♠  ♠  ♠  ♠

As the rest of the Vanguard had been busy subduing the Chessmen’s white strikeforce, Gideon had been crawling back to his feet and trying to pull his wits together. It was obvious that his teleportation power was not going to be coming into play today, he was forced to admit as his head cleared. But maybe his other power could still be utilized… Álvaro had been slightly dismayed last week when he’d seen that his vaunted rotating phase shields couldn’t keep Gideon from passing through them like a ghost. Hopefully the tech genius hadn’t had time to find a way around that omission yet…

Gideon reached a tentative hand out to the silvery wall of Quanta’s temporary prison… and grinned as it passed through it without the slightest residence. The rest of him followed behind with alacrity. The interior of the dome was lit only by the red glow of the robots’ eyes and weapons, and the green glow of the laser guns on the armored dude’s arms. Clearly none of them needed the visible spectrum to see what they were doing – which seemed to be hammering on the shell that imprisoned them all.

Well, we can’t have that, Gideon thought as he watched faint cracks appear in the super dense material. He eyed the position of his opponents and considered the angles… which in the relatively confined space were rather interesting.

“Hey boys,” he called out, stepping to the spot he’d picked, “it looks like you can hit the side of a barn – or some freaky quantum construct, whatever – but I bet you can’t hit me…” he cocked his head quizzically and grinned.

The robot on his left was the first to let go with its arm-mounted machine-guns. The high-calibre stream of lead went straight into the center-of-mass of the target… and  passed harmlessly through, to tear into the meal guts of another robot behind him. Before the tactical computers of the other robots could absorb this datum two others had also fired on the target – one attack passed through to ricochet off the silvery walls, while the other struck but didn’t seem to harm the black Knight.

Realizing he couldn’t effect the Phantom Ace, the Knight resumed his assault on the wall, and using a single massive burst of laser energy, rather than the pulsed bursts his weapon usually delivered, blew a third of the structure away. In triumph he surged forward – straight into the waiting line of the Vanguard.

As the rest of the wall melted from existence Gideon saw Quanta gesture and one of his massive quantum blocks appeared over the three of the remaining robots. They looked up and he laughed as he visualized them holding up Coyote-esque signs with “Uh-oh!” printed on them. Then the block fell, crushing all three flat and then vanishing back into the ether before it could hit the pavement – which was really the deck of the Danger Room, Gideon realized. Jeez, that Quanta really was a genius! The pile of shattered exoskeletons smoked and threw off a few sparks, a few limbs twitched for a moment, and then stilled.

Gideon came up behind the black Knight, who was focused on attacking the heroes in front of him, and grabbed an armored shoulder. He phased, trying to take the man with him… but something in the armor resisted him, and his opponent remained solid. Which, of course, left him open to the bolt of red mystic energy that Totem unleashed on him, sending him to stumbling back.

Artemis dodged another swarm of Taser darts from the last Pawn, then did a sweeping kick to knock it off its feet. Before it could rise she was on top of it, driving her electrified escrima sticks into its head, which shattered. As she rose she saw the Blue Flame set off a flash of dazzling white light that seemed to momentarily blind the Knight’s optical sensors. To her approval he immediately followed up on the distraction and swooped in, his plasma katana taking shape in his hands. The energy weapon slashed across the chest of the armored figure, sending drops of molten material flying as it scored a deep gouge in the armor.

The Knight staggered back, arms flailing as the man inside tried to both keep his balance and aim his weapons – and he might have succeeded in at least one of those things if his foot hadn’t hit the remains of one of the destroyed Pawns. He went over on his back with a thunderous crash, and Artemis knew then it was all but over.

But as Scion moved in to make sure he stayed down, the armored man suddenly spasmed, his back arcing so sharply they could hear the sound as his back broke, before collapsing into utter stillness. Scion bent and ripped the helmet off the man’s head, revealing the face of a Caucasian man perhaps 30 years old… although it was hard to be certain, as his face was twisted in a rictus of pain, eyes rolled back so that only the whites showed, and steam rising from both the eyes and the gaping mouth.

“This one too,” Totem called out a moment later. He’d immediately dashed off to where they’d left the mystically bound white Knight, pulling off that helmet as well, revealing the equally distorted face of an African-American man. The Vanguard stood between the two corpses, and wondered just what the hell was going on here… and then the parking lot vanished, leaving them once again in the Training Room.

♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

The doors proved to be unlocked after the last of the Chessmen was dead, and the Vanguard immediately set to work seeking answers. While Artemis called SHADE and arranged for a team to quietly collect the bodies and the remains of the robots, Scion and Quanta sought out Álvaro de La Vega. They found him just leaving the marathon staff meeting he’d left them for that morning, and he appeared genuinely shocked when he heard what had happened. His shock turned to a dark rage neither hero had seen in him before when he heard the name “Chessmen,”and he set off quickly for the Training Room Control Center.

Until the next morning he still had unfettered access to the Vanguard floors, so he didn’t need his companions to let him in and was the first into the small, very high tech room. Smoke was still pouring from one of the primary consoles, and he swore long and colorfully (something else they’d never heard before) as he began tapping out commands. It took almost half an hour, with Álvaro impatiently waving away any questions or interruptions, before he settled back in the chair and sighed.

“This is bad,” he said presently, turning to look at Scion and Quanta, who had been closely watching everything he’d done. “But not nearly as bad as it could have been if you hadn’t defeated the intruders so quickly. That would have been a disaster of the first order!

“The Chessmen seemed to have planted taps into the computer systems of the Pyramid… I don’t know how yet, but I promise you I will, and soon! These taps allowed them to remotely control the Training Room systems and bypass the current security systems… I suspect they chose today to make their attack precisely because the full security systems go online tomorrow.

“The taps allowed them to hack into the Vanguard systems, and from there into the secure links to the AzTech servers and the classified SHADE systems as well. But from what I can tell they didn’t have time to access more than the surface layers of the first two, and nothing at all of the latter, thank God. I hate to imagine the fallout if they’d managed to get to some of my own classified files, never mind the government’s…

“Not that SHADE could really do much finger pointing here – since the announcement that the Vanguard was moving in they’ve had people all over this building making sure everything was secure, most especially the computer and data storage systems.”

“Quanta and I have both been over the systems ourselves,” Scion agreed. “We didn’t see any indication of compromised systems either.”

“They must have been completely inert,” Quanta agreed, “waiting until they were needed to power up. That still begs the question of how they got in here to plant them in the first place.”

“Not just here,” Álvaro said, shaking his head. “All throughout the Tower from what I can tell. It’s going to be hell for the next few days as my people go through every system – it won’t be hard to find the compromised ones, if they’ve all self-destructed like this one, but we’ll have to make sure there are no hidden, unpowered ones lying in reserve… at least we know what to look for now.”

“Will you delay the official opening of the building then?” Scion asked absently as he began examining the fused components himself, already reconstructing them in his mind.

“Hell no!” Álvaro exclaimed forcefully. “I won’t give those bastards the satisfaction. As far as the public will ever know, this whole event never happened. I’m glad Artemis called SHADE and not the APD… they know how to keep secrets.

“So put on your game faces, kids – tomorrow the party goes on as planned!”