The damage to the AzTech Pyramid from the Chessmen’s attack, aside from the Vanguard’s Training Room, was minimal, and de la Vega’s Grand Opening gala went forward with barely a blip on the media’s radar. Meg Halcyon’s exclusive tour of the Vanguard’s new HQ that same evening was unaffected, as the Danger Room was one of the classified areas that was already off limits to the press and public. Totem and Artemis led the young reporter around, with the former answering most of her questions, while the latter felt, to her own quiet amusement, more and more like a chaperone as the evening went on. Towards the end of the visit she had tactfully excused herself on some vague errand, leaving Totem to see his friend out. Or not, as the case might be…
The opening ceremonies the next day went off without a hitch, and with no super villain attacks – somewhat to the surprise of several of the heroes, who had perhaps read too many classic comic books. The first Vanguard press conference that followed was packed, with a friendly and enthusiastic crowd of print, online and broadcast journalists. A bright and cheerful Meg Halcyon was front row center… wearing a different outfit than last night, Artemis noted. Which proved nothing, of course… the young woman struck her as someone who came prepared for every possibility.
After the grand opening, with the crowds and the media gone and the building’s security measures in full effect at last, the heroes had gotten down to seriously investigating the Chessmen’s infiltration and attack. By the next morning both Álvaro’s and SHADE’s best computer forensics teams had confirmed that the illicit computer taps had only managed to breech the first layer of both the Vanguard and AzTech firewalls; therefore none of the connected SHADE firewalls had been compromised at all. The limited data stolen was not critical, and no one’s secrets had been exposed – neither the Vanguards IDs nor de la Vega’s technical or trade secrets.
Artemis had briefed the group on what she new about the Chessmen’s previous incarnation, supplemented by a SHADE report delivered in person by Agent Stark, over breakfast. Once they had heard the full tale Quanta had pressed the perky, and yet oddly intense, agent for details on the long missing Alexander Kaspar, son of the previous head of the old spy ring, and she had departed with a promise to be in touch as soon as she learned anything.
“Wait a minute,” Phantom Ace had said once Stark was gone, pulling back from his grab for a third coffee cake muffin and staring at Artemis. “She said this gang was taken down in 1986, like, thirty years ago… but you said you helped the original Raptor defeat them. Raptor and SHADE, whatever. So, what… were you like some sort of Ninja-Tot™? Lil’ Artemis, the Dark Kindergarten Avenger (which is also ™ by the way)?”
The sudden mental image of a six-year-old Artemis in a tiny black costume and cloak, perhaps tooling around Astoria on her Big Wheel, almost made Chilz choke on his own bear claw pastry. While Jonny pounded him on the back and the others looked variously amused, probably at similar mental images, Artemis said merely “I am older than I appear, obviously.”
‘Well, yeah,” Phantom Ace persisted. “But how old is that… um… exactly…” he tapered off at her single raised eyebrow.
“And as I said,” she went on after a moment of awkward silence. “I primarily provided Raptor with intelligence I’d gathered; he passed it on to SHADE, and between them they did the actual ‘taking down’ of the organization. Now, moving on, Quanta’s theory that Alexander Kaspar may be behind this new incarnation has some promise…”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The next day Artemis was just finishing a late morning training session with Kyle and Jonny, both in their non-powered states, in the Danger Room (she still winced at the name, but after the Chessmen’s commandeering of the chamber and the ensuing fight for their lives… well, she would never give up a fight while there was a chance for victory, but she also knew a losing battle when she saw it) when Gideon’s voice came over the public address system.
“Hey everybody, better get to the meeting room, looks like we’ve got a crisis! A Code, um… Orange, I think? Anyway get down here! Oh, that just means the Vanguard, by the way, not everybody else, obviously…”
While Jonny whooped, Kyle and Artemis shared a brief eye-roll, and they all headed for the door. Everyone had agreed to split monitoring duty until the permanent communications staff started next week, and Phantom Ace was currently up, but he clearly hadn’t been reading his procedures manual… and they’d need to go over PA ettiequte again…
In the formal meeting room, with it’s stunning views of the city, Mt. Defiance, and the Pacific, they were the last to seat themselves around the high-tech octagonal table. Having taken the call, Gideon was running the show, and he tapped out a command on the keyboard in front of him. The holographic display embedded in the tabletop lit up, and a 3D map of the city sprang into existence above it. The view rotated and zoomed in on a section of the Outer Peninsula.
“About five minutes ago,” he began, “SHADE lost contact with a secret convoy that was moving some classified equipment from their current offices out to the construction site where the Bunker is being finished as their new HQ. Comms seem to be being jammed, and backup is on the way, but the last information that got out indicates this might be a meta-human attack… and we’re closer anyway. They’re asking us to check it out and lend whatever aid is needed to protect the shipment and the agents.”
It was good to know the kid could be serious when the situation required it, Kyle thought as he studied the map. His quantum shell flowed over him as he stood up. “OK, I can get us there in seconds via a quantum tunnel. Thoughts before we go through?” Phantom Ace quickly tapped out the code that lowered the teleportation shields on Quanta’s “frequency.”
“With minimal information on actual conditions on the ground it is difficult to make effective tactical decisions,” Artemis said. “As I recall, your tunnels, while two-way, are obscured by a hazing effect at the interface. So we will have to go in blind.
“Therefore, I suggest you go first, Quanta – be prepared to secure our “beachhead” with a wall if needed; the Blue Flame next, for aerial reconnaissance; Chilz in his ice form should follow, then myself and Totem; Scion should bring up the rear. Any objections?”
“Hey, what about me?” Phantom Ace objected. “I can go in first and–”
“You’re not going in at all, Ace,” Scion said as everyone else got into position. “You’re on monitor duty, remember? What if another call comes in while we’re engaged on this one?”
“Oh… Well, yeah, I guess… but can’t I–”
“Until we have our communications staff in place, someone must remain here,” Artemis said brusquely. “We will be in touch via our comm links, assuming we can end the jamming once on-site, and will summon you should your power-set be needed. Aside from being the duty officer, as a teleporter you make the most sense as backup, yes?”
Unable to argue with the logic of the situation, Phantom Ace sank back in his chair (they really were the most comfortable furniture he’d ever experienced, he had to admit) and glumly watched his teammates step through Quanta’s shimmering portal one by one, his finger hovering over the button that would re-engage the building’s full shields…
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The ambush site was a good one, Amber thought as she hovered and absently fired another bolt of mystic energy into the innocent travel agency. Right where Wyatt Avenue T’d off into Cumberland, the truck had slowed to make the righthand turn, sandwiched between its two escorting SUVs. Which, honestly, was sort of a dead giveaway, Amber thought. No! Mystic! I’ve gotta start thinking of myself by my code name when I’m in this get-up, or I’ll end up blurting my real name out at just the worst time. Anyway, what was the point of moving something secretly, in a disguised Reeser’s Foods semi no less, if you’re gonna have cars that just scream government in front and behind.
“I’m getting bored,” said Gator from the street below her. He was a real freak, and he made her pretty nervous. Almost seven feet tall, he was more like a bipedal alligator than a man – including the tail and the snout full of razor sharp teeth. Well, be fair Amb- Mystic, it’s not like it’s his fault… and he’s actually been pretty polite to me… he hardly stared at my boobs at all. Not like that creep “Captain Oblivion.” Gator tore up another large chuck of asphalt with his enormous claws and hurled it into the Ace Hardware building next to the travel agency.
“Yeah, but we gotta stick to the plan, big guy,” she said, trying to sound positive and upbeat; which wasn’t too hard when she looked at Gator and realized how lucky she’d been when the Incident was handing out powers… compared to others. “That’s our ticket to the big times, right?”
“Yeah yeah,” the monster rumbled, beginning to pry up another piece of the street. “But if I gotta listen to that twat Oblivion go on for much longer –” he growled ominously. Am- Mystic– understood the sentiment, for sure. Their supposed “team leader” stood atop the overturned semi-trailer, his steam-punk duster flaring “dramatically” around him as he monologued about his own coolness, his ‘great awakening’ and how he would bring a new age of nihilism, whatever that was, to the world. Apparently he was trying to bore the SHADE agents to death. And God knew, they were doing their best to return the favor by shooting at him regularly from the camera store where most of them had holed up. Unfortunately, the bullets just disintegrated in the blue flare from his hand.
Mystic couldn’t see the loser’s hot girlfriend anywhere, but she knew she was around – their backup for when the new capes arrived. Now she managed to pull off the whole steam-punk-meets-goth look really well, unlike her loser boyfriend. Mystic couldn’t figure out what a woman like that saw in an obvious dead end like Oblivious, even with his destructive powers. Like, the chick was hot! Not that Amb- Mystic was a lez or anything (that time with Tiffany didn’t count, they were both drunk, and it was just the once), but hot was hot.
Unlike that walking tarpit that was currently threatening the two agents hiding behind their overturned and smashed SUV at the rear of the truck. If Gator scared her a bit, Tar Baby just made her want to puke. It talked, so it must’ve been human once… not a very bright human, if his conversation is a clue… but now he was a barely humanoid blob of stinking black… well, tar, she supposed. He’d pulled the driver of the truck out, once she’d stopped it and Gator had overturned it, and engulfed the poor man in his blob-like body. Mystic really had almost puked then, as she watched the driver trying to punch and claw his way out, his struggles growing feebler as he suffocated, until they stopped altogether. Tar Baby had ejected the corpse like spitting out a watermelon seed. Amber had made sure she was out of sight when he’d started in on those two agents whose bodies lay near his “feet” now…
“I’m bored,” Gator repeated, throwing his latest chunk of dismembered roadway into the hardware store so that it barely missed Oblivion’s head. The young man shot his supposed “teammate” a glare, but didn’t miss a beat in his increasingly operatic oration.
“Well, let’s see if we can’t do something about that,” a voice called out from behind him, and the giant lizard-man whirled with a hiss…
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
As Quanta came through his portal, he saw with some gratification that he had arrived with the four villains’ backs to him. He immediately called out what he saw over his comm link as the others streamed through behind him.
“Blond female in a green costume, hovering in air, some sort of ranged energy blasts; giant humanoid alligator, ripping up the road like it was made of cheese; some cos-play steam punk dude with a complex device of some sort on his left forearm and a glowing blue hand… but whose power seems to be making speeches about his own awesomeness; and… something that looks like it escaped from an episode of Star Trek… the one where that evil tar pit killed Tasha Yar…”
The Blue Flame, soaring above him, confirmed his numbers, adding that he counted six surviving AEGIS agents – four in the camera store on the corner, two behind the ruined SUV behind the truck – and at least three dead. Or at least really, really still.
Quanta, horrified by the walking tar thing as it reached out pseudopods towards the two nearest agents, decide that was the most immediate threat. And not one he needed to be too careful about, either. He formed a very large, very heavy bock of quantum matter over the creature, and handed it off to gravity. It made a very satisfying “squorshing” sound as it flattened the thing into a thin film. The nearest SHADE agent waved a half salute at him as she swapped clips, then began shooting at the pontificating ass-wipe on top of the truck.
Scion, flying in fast and moving high, focused his optics on the same black-masked, be-goggled dufus, and twitched on his comm link. “There’s a large black case at his feet – high-tech looking and with the SHADE seal on the side. I’m assuming that’s what all the fuss is about.”
“I’ve got this guy,” Blue Flame yelled at almost the same time, and dove in while unleashing a plasma blast. Captain Oblivion (and he’d made sure everyone in earshot knew his name) pivoted aside and the blast narrowly missed him – and the case as well, thankfully. But the hole it melted in the truck undercut the case… which tottered on the edge for a moment, before dropping back into the trailer from which it had apparently just been liberated.
“Well fuck,” Oblivion said in annoyance. “I guess I should’ve held on to that. Oh well, no problem.” With a shrug he hopped down on the far side of the trailer, where he was blocked from the view of most of the Vanguard.
Meanwhile, Chilz had taken aim at the hovering woman with the green energy blasts. She’d seemed taken off guard by the sudden appearance of the heroes behind her, and her one shot so far had missed everyone. Now he quickly lowered the temperature around her – in just seconds it went from a pleasant 64° F to almost 30 below, and the woman was clearly turning blue.
Totem, coming up behind him, made an odd gesture and muttered something… a bolt of red energy flashed up from his hands and struck the young woman square in the face. Her head snapped back, she went limp, and her body dropped like a stone. With another gesture Totem slowed her fall, and once she was on the ground violet bands of energy wrapped her tightly.
“Wel, that’s one down,” Chilz laughed, slapping the shaman on the back, almost staggering him. “This is gonna be a piece of cake… ice cream cake!”
“Perhaps,” Totem said, grimacing as he stretched his shoulders. “But do not count your eagles before the fledglings have left the nest.”
While her teammates had focused on the aerial threat, Artemis had instantly tagged the gigantic alligator-man as the more serious problem. Given the state of the street and the ruined vehicles on it, it was clear he was immensely strong, and as tall as he was he had reach on all of them, save perhaps Chilz. Her escrima sticks were out, electrified, and in the air almost before she’d cleared the portal… but the creature moved with surprising speed for something so massive, and they missed.
Scion, obviously agreeing with her assessment, swooped in from above, stitching a line of armor-piecing bullets across the behemoth’s back. To no apparent effect, and the thing moved so quickly, as it turned on this new attacker, that Scion barely escaped its claws.
At that moment the fuel tanks in the gas station where Quanta’s portal had been anchored erupted in a massive explosion. As the fireball rose into the sky the concussion hurled everyone near the front end of the overturned SHADE truck forward and blew in the few remaining windows in the buildings across the street. It also blew in all the windows of the apartment building next to the station, as well as setting it ablaze.
Scion was knocked from the air, Quanta was driven to his knees, head ringing, Totem was thrown into the tires of the overturned truck and slumped to the ground, and Artemis had managed to turn her brief flight into a controlled flip, coming down in crouch, dazed, but still functional. Both Chilz and the alligator man seemed entirely unfazed by the explosion…
“You were saying?” Totem growled as Chilz helped pull him to his feet.
“Okay, maybe not cake, per se…” the elemental replied, the ruddy glow of the flames glinting off his ice form.
As his friends shook off the effects of the explosion below him, the Blue Flame reluctantly turned from his attack on Oblivi-dufus – his last slash with his Plasma Katana had seared across the man’s chest, opening duster and shirt and blistering the skin beneath. It had also distracted him from disintegrating the side of the truck with his glowing blue gauntlet, and re-stealing the mysterious case. But there were people in that burning building, so he really had no choice…
Soaring up to hover over the column of flame and smoke still pouring from the burning gas station, the Blue Flame reached out and drew the conflagration to himself, becoming the center of a swirling vortex of red and orange. When the source of the fire was gone, he turned his attention to the burning apartment building, drawing those flames, too, into himself…
Meanwhile the others had renewed their attack on Gator, as they learned he was called when Oblivion had yelled for him to “keep the damn heroes busy.” And he seemed more than happy to oblige. Scion had taken a slashing claw across the side which had actually furrowed his armor, much to his shock. It hadn’t penetrated to his flesh, and the metal immediately began to heal itself, but the fact it had happened at all meant this thing was far more powerful than he’d thought. Lets see if he shrugs off Electro-bolts as easily as bullets…
Chilz used his Arctic Freeze once again, bringing the temperature down precipitously… which may have slowed the man slightly, but seemed to have no other effect. Still, combined with Scion’s attacks it allowed Artemis, coming in from behind, to achieve a choke hold on the creature, wrapping the carbon-steel garrote from one of her sticks around the massive neck and twisting. But even her great strength wasn’t enough to cut off either his air or his blood flow, although it was enough to keep him occupied.
Gator roared and spun in circles, trying to get a grip on the woman trying to strangle him, tail thrashing wildly. Totem’s Bitter Lash spell kept tangling his arms, doing little harm, but keeping him from effectively using his claws. The electric pulses from Scion’s attacks were actually painful, and he was growing dizzy as the electricity shocked him again and again…
Once the flames were out and the occupants of the apartment building safe, at least for the moment, the Blue Flame had returned to his attack on Oblivion. The would-be hijacker had been prevented from gaining entry to the trailer during his absence by Quanta throwing up one of his solid shields around the overturned vehicle. The SHADE agents had continued to keep the villain off balance with repeated fusillades of hot lead… these didn’t hurt him, but they did force him to focus on disintegrating bullets rather than the quantum shield.
Now the Blue Flame swooped down and grabbed the man’s weapon, the glowing, flashing, steam punk gauntlet on his left arm. As his flaming hand pulled the construct away it had sparked and melted and then vanished in a blue flash, reduced to its component atoms. Oblivion had stumbled back with a yell, shaking his arm… which appeared to be no more burned than as if by a mild sunburn.
“You blue bastard,” he’d bellowed. “I worked really hard on that little bit of misdirection! And I liked it!” Then he grinned and reached out to touch Quanta’s shield wall with his still-glowing blue hand. “Oh well, I guess the cat’s out of the bag now!”
At his touch, the quantum matter turned blue, then black, then began to disintegrate into nothingness. And as the destruction spread and the Blue Flame formed his Plasma Katana for another attack… the fire hydrant directly beneath him suddenly ruptured! A column of water shot up with the force of a cannon, and the fiery hero was blasted into the sky in a billowing cloud of steam.
As his teammate pinwheeled away, Chilz rose up on a platform of ice, gliding through the air to where he could see the monologue-moron who was quickly destroying Quanta’s shielding… although he wasn’t quite so chatty once he’d been blasted with ice shards… Now let’s see how he likes arctic temperatures, shall we? But before he could do more than create a brief chill, his ice platform spit in two with a crack like a rifle shot, then shattered into a dozen shards, sending him crashing to the ground.
A moment earlier Quanta had been preparing to renew his wall… he could keep creating as long as the bastard could keep destroying, time and numbers were on the Vanguard’s side… when he’d seen the bizarre-looking woman step out of the shadows of the alley between the 7-11 and the damaged apartment building. Bizarre, and yet strangely compelling… she was dressed in a black-on-black outfit with silver trim and buttons, like something from a Goth-Vampire-Alice in Wonderland-meets-Victorian-London acid trip… including a jaunty top hat and opera glasses and rainbow colored hair. Kyle had been instantly entranced by her almost ethereal beauty…
Then she’d gestured with the glasses and said “What a pity the idiot’s ice platform suddenly cracked in two and then shattered!” And that’s exactly what had happened a second later. As Chilz staggered back to his feet, Quanta snapped out of his momentary infatuation ad let loose a blast of bucky balls at the woman… but she was fast, and laughingly dodged them. He dashed forward, hoping to clock her before she could speak again, but the distance was too great.
“Epiphany Jones thinks it’s so sad that the gas line under the street should rupture and ignite right beneath the shiny hero!”
Well shit, Quanta thought as he was blasted into the air by the sudden gas explosion. I think she can reshape probability to to her will… this could be bad…
As he shook off the effects of the blast, he saw a green mist beginning to fall around the woman’s head… Totem’s sleeping mists! Epiphany Jones staggered, and put a hand to her head.
“Morris!” she cried out. “I feel so… strange…”
In an instant, Oblivion was back on top of the truck trailer. “Nora! It’s OK babe! I think this little audition has run its course – we’ve shown our chops, now it’s time we exit, stage left!”
Whatever he might have meant by that, he didn’t immediately get to act on it as a recovered Blue Flame roared down out of the sky at him, flaming Plasma Katana in hand. Oblivion dodged the blow, and as the hero flashed past he reached out with his own blue hand, trying to grasp a leg. His grip merely grazed the burning leg, but the pain Jonny felt was excruciating, and he shot straight up to escape it.
At this point everyone’s attention was momentarily drawn by a scream. Tar Baby had oozed out from under Quanta’s block of quantum matter and grabbed the nearest SHADE agent. As everyone watched in horror, his two elongated arms drew her struggling form in close, and his body suddenly crested up like a wave and engulfed her… her screams were muffled, but they could see the viscous body warp and bulge as she attempted to fight her way out of the deadly envelopment…
Captain Oblivion took the distraction to reach down and disintegrate a hole in the ground at his own feet – which he then vanished into head first. Thirty seconds later the sidewalk near Epiphany Jones suddenly erupted in a spray of disintegrating dirt and concrete, and he leaped out to grab her around the waist and pull her close.
“You OK baby?” he asked, sounding genuine for the first time that day.
“Yeah,” she replied with a grin. “I think that Indian did something to make me drowsy, but I’m feelin’ fine now that you’re here!” She glanced over at the semi cab, on its side 100 feet away. “Too bad that truck’s gas tank exploded and killed all these fuckers!”
The truck’s gas tank did explode, but it was quickly obvious to Quanta that the stunning woman’s power to bend probability to her will was not absolute – none of the nearby heroes were even dazed by the relatively small blast, much less killed. Which was good, of course, but still made her much too dangerous to fool around with… he formed another heavy block over the pair of villains…
But as it fell Oblivion raised his glowing hand in a slashing arc that disintegrated the middle third of the block. Although the two remaining parts crashed down to either side of the pair, debris struck Epiphany a glancing blow to the head and shoulder. Her lover caught her as she staggered, blood trickling from an abrasion on her pale forehead.
“Artemis, forget the alligator,” Quanta called over the comm link. “The woman can alter reality to some degree, and we need to take her out of this equation fast!”
After a final, futile attempt to choke him out, Artemis released her hold on Gator, flipped herself over the monster, pushing off against his back to land in a crouch twenty feet away. Her escrima sticks flew toward her new target… but despite what she knew should have been direct hits to head and kidney, the attack seemed somehow to miss the Goth queen entirely.
At this point Quanta had managed to push the fight out into the street, closer to the monstrous Tar Baby and his struggling victim. This allowed Totem to summon his Sleeping Mists once again and this time they encompassed all three remaining villains. It was hard to be sure with the living tar pit, but he/it seemed to weaken – one of the trapped agent’s arms punched through to the air; Epiphany Jones and Captain Oblivion, unfortunately, seemed to shrug off the soporific effects almost immediately.
Gator, meanwhile, had taken advantage of the heroes focus on his “teammates” to decide he’d had enough. Ripping apart the glowing net of electricity within which Scion had tried to entangle him, he dove for the center of street and the nearest manhole cover. Ripping it up, he hurled it over his shoulder like a Frisbee. It didn’t connect with the flying hero, but it did make him dodge, which was all Gator needed to make it into the dark, cool safety of the sewers…
Scion considered going after the behemoth, but the weakening struggles of the entombed agent caught his eye, and he made his choice… electro bolts blasted into the mass of living tar. They seemed to to nothing more than irritate it, though, and a pseudopod lashed out as he flew by, knocking him into the increasingly mangled trailer.
A second later Totem’s Bitter Lash struck the creature, causing it to shuffle backward, emitting a high-pitched squeal. Suddenly, Quanta was cursing over the comms. “Damnit, Epiphany and Oblivion are getting away!” Totem looked back to see the strange couple vanishing into a new hole the man had made in the street. The silvery hero prepared to dive in after them…
“No!” Artemis called out. “We need to free the agent and contain this “Tar Baby.” And in such close quarters Oblivion’s powers might easily prove lethal, even to you!”
Furious as he was at the escape, Quanta couldn’t deny his teammate’s logic, and he turned to vent his anger by blasting a stream of razor-sharp carbon knives into the side of the damn walking tar pit… the side furthest from the struggling agent, of course. Annoyingly, they seemed to do absolutely no damage, and were spit out almost immediately…
The Blue Flames‘ plasma blasts also seemed to have little effect, unless it was to make the thing even more flexible, and a little quicker… the agent’s freed arm once again vanished into the mass. Well, if heat energized the thing, then it would follow…
“Chilz! Blasts it with all the cold you’ve got!” Quanta called to his teammate.
The towering ice man nodded and encased the murderous villain and his would-be victim in a vortex of arctic cold. This definitely had the opposite effect from the heat, and in fact seemed to make the creature almost solid. Already slowed somewhat by Totem’s mists, it was now effectively immobile… Quanta fired another blast of bucky balls at it at the same time that Scion unloosed a barrage of bullets… and the black blob shattered into a dozen large pieces, which fell away from the encased agent.
The SHADE agent staggered away from the rubble, gasping for breath, and her partner rushed to assist her. While Totem checked her for injuries, Quanta gathered all the shattered pieces of the Tar Baby into a quantum matter container. Already the smaller pieces were beginning to melt, and as they did they started flowing back together.
“Oh no,” Quanta said with a grim smile. “I’ve seen this movie too many times, and it is not happening here!” Once he had all the pieces contained, he sealed them into a thick sphere and set it where he could keep an eye on it.
Three of the four agents who had taken refuge in the now-ruined camera store came out with restrained, but obviously heartfelt, thanks for the save. “I’m pretty sure this whole thing was a set up,” one of the agents said. “They could have killed all of us pretty quickly; and even if they hadn’t, we couldn’t have prevented them from escaping with the… case. Instead, they seemed to be waiting for something.”
“Us, no doubt,” Artemis said drily. “From we overheard there at the end, this appears to be have been some sort of “audition.” For whom… well, I have a few guesses, but I’ll want more data. Speaking which, where is the case?”
“Right here, ma’am,” said the fourth agent, who had made a beeline for the destroyed truck. He had the large case handcuffed to his own wrist, and made no move to offer it up for closer inspection. “Comms have cleared now, and our back up is less than two minutes out. Containment transports for the prisoners will be here within six minutes.”
Artemis knew enough not to even bother asking what was in the case – she’d been dealing with SHADE since its creation, and government bureaucracies for almost a century before that. But of course that didn’t stop the Blue Flame or Chilz, both of whom enquired eagerly, and rather innocently, about the case’s contents. Fortunately they both accepted the bland “I’m sorry sirs – that’s classified” response without an argument.
Jonny’s easy acceptance was perhaps accounted for by his injury. Having reverted to his human form, he was aghast to find his left leg marred by four long scars, which were red and throbbing still. Totem and Quanta between them were able to sooth the pain and mostly heal the flesh, but the scars remained – pale white reminders that his energy form wasn’t entirely untouchable, and that he wasn’t invulnerable.
SHADE had the prisoners secured and removed from he scene, along with the bodies of the slain agents and the driver, just as the first emergency responders from the city arrived, leaving the heroes to explain the situation to the APD. The Astoria Fire Department made sure the fires were truly out and provided what little first aid the residents of the various shops and the apartment building needed – fortunately there had been no civilian deaths, and only minor injuries.
Within the hour the Vanguard was back in the Pyramid, and Phantom Ace was reminded again about why he needed an office. Even though he hadn’t been in the field, he’d been the one to take the call for help from SHADE, and needed to do an After Action Report, just like the others. At least his was much shorter, he thought… and it was Scion who had to compile them all into the final report that would be sent to SHADE and the APD.
Definitely good not to be the boss, he concluded as he closed his report file and sent it off. And he was off duty now… therefore time for some video game action in the cinema, since he’d missed out on the real thing earlier… and Grand Theft Auto V looked incredible on that big screen… and the sound system! Heaven!