42

Extension 5

With our side of the story told, Triumph was instantly convinced. Or, it seemed more like he was convinced by the fact that his cousin nodded. "I'm heading back to HQ. I'm going to kick the director's ass myself," he growled.

"Wait, there could be an explanation," Miss Militia cautioned her teammate.

"Like what? What possible excuse could there be for kidnapping my cousin for months?" Triumph shouted back angrily.

"I'm just saying, he could have been Mastered! Or framed! We need to make sure justice is done properly, in accordance with the law," Miss Militia said. "We aren't judge and jury, Triumph. But we can bring him there if we have to."

"Fine. I'm radioing it in to the team, but don't try to stop me," Triumph said.

Funny thing was, even before he said a thing over the radio, Calvert was already starting to make his escape and plant excuses. He again warned that there was a Master situation with New Wave, that some heroes may have been subverted. He gave multiple confusing orders to different people, sending employees running around the building, too busy with pointless chores to realize he had even left his office. In the ensuing chaos and urgency to lock down against a Master threat, Coil walked out unnoticed.

I was planning on trapping him in the elevator, activating the emergency brakes and jamming the mechanisms once he was inside, but he walked right past it to the fire escape.

I then thought about tripping him while he ran down the stairs, but he held the handrail like a responsible adult and moved with a surprising caution. He wasn't going to fall down in any way that could be mistaken for clumsiness. Anything more overt that I did could easily be construed as an aggressive, criminal act, and caught on the building' security cameras.

If there was anything I learned from New Wave's team meetings, the one thing that annoyed Brandish the most was when one of her cases was lost because a criminal got off on some excessive force charge or illegal evidence.

I continued with the subtle sabotage. I detached the battery inside his car and drained it completely of energy. When he got to the garage, he didn't even take his car. Instead he walked out to the street and hailed a cab. Just like Lisa had told us, he had some way of making the "right" decision every time, but I could make things very difficult and corner him. Out in the streets, I had even more control.

By now, the rest of the Protectorate had been alerted by Triumph, but when they began searching the building for him, he was already outside. I disconnected the car's battery and plugged up a gas line – I didn't want to destroy an innocent driver's vehicle to nab Calvert. When the engine sputtered and died, Calvert didn't wait for the cab to get fixed. He threw some money at the driver, got out, and started rushing down the street.

I let the cab start up normally again after Calvert was gone. I was no mechanic, I just hoped I hadn't done any permanent damage.

"Calvert moving," I had Abyssal tell everyone.

"Where?" Triumph was quick to respond.

"Follow." While my bots slowed down Calvert, I had Abyssal lead the heroes to him.

Abyssal rushed past all the police, PRT, and reporters that were surrounding City Hall. Leaping over vehicles and people was no problem. Miss Militia and Triumph followed him with some difficulty, but I made sure I went slow enough for them to keep up.

There was definitely some confusion among the ranks of the PRT and Protectorate, but unfortunately for us, not enough. I had to respect the fact that the PRT had trained for confusing situations like this.

"Potential Master/Stranger, level 4, move in on villain group New Wave."

The orders came over the radio, and they acted on their previously-known information without Calvert directing them. I may have compromised the chain of command but they weren't headless.

Inside his office, the mayor could see the action out the window. The building had no hidden entrances and a large, open lawn, so it was easy to watch the PRT troops storm the building. "Lady Photon? It looks like they're storming the building."

"They probably believe we took you hostage," Brandish said. "Nobody resist. Stay calm and let them take us into custody. Keep your cameras rolling."

I followed their example and didn't use my bots to hinder the troops. They were all sitting calmly around the office when the troops rushed in. They did throw in a flashbang, which was probably unnecessary but they did it for their own safety. My bots were blinded, the team was blinded, the cameras may have been damaged.

Within seconds, the PRT team rushed in. They did handle my team somewhat roughly – pinning them to the ground before they even recovered from the flashbang. However, my team followed Brandish's orders to get on the ground and let themselves be handcuffed, so at least they didn't have to get trapped in containment foam.

At the same time, they did follow procedure – maybe it was because the Mayor was insisting they were heroes, maybe it was because of the presence of a child, maybe it was because of New Wave's reputation before being declared villains out of the blue – but they weren't too rough on my team. That actually surprised me.

They patted everyone down for weapons or suspicious devices – apparently that included the cameras, phones, and radios – before letting anyone up. They were quietly escorted out the front without incident. By now, the news agencies were rushing to ask what happened, especially when they saw the Mayor holding his niece in his arms walking out the door.

Not too far away, the director was running along the sidewalk, trying to hail another cab when Triumph and Miss Militia finally caught up to him. Perhaps Miss Militia's jeep had a distinctive noise that Calvert recognized, or maybe he was using his power again, but he reacted before they came into sight. Just before everyone rounded the corner, he ducked into a flower shop to try to hide. The others didn't see, but Abyssal pointed him out to them.

"Fancy seeing you here, Director," Triumph snarled. "Didn't think the current emergency would be solved with flowers."

"Triumph. This isn't your assigned patrol route," Calvert said, trying to act normal. As calm as his voice was, I could tell he was running out of ideas. Good.

"And this doesn't look like your office," Triumph countered.

Miss Militia joined her patrol partner with her glowing power in the form of a taser. "Sir, several sources have accused you of kidnapping, child abuse, drug trafficking, among other things. It would be best if you came with us quietly and cleared things up."

Calvert seemed to be thinking really hard, trying to find a way to talk himself out of this. "You're all cooperating with villains. You've been Mastered. Report to M-S isolation now. That's an order."

"No, sir, I don't think I will," Miss Militia said. "Console, did you get that?"

I didn't wait for their response. This was taking too long, and my team would be carted away from public view soon, where evidence could be buried and "forgotten" under some convoluted bureaucracy. I wanted his face on the news. I wanted Dinah to single him out in public. I wanted everyone to see him for what he was, now.

I had Abyssal appear behind him and grab him. If his parahuman ability revolved around him making the right choice every time, the best bet was to give him no choices at all. I restrained and stopped him from talking, then carried him out through the doorway.

"Follow. City Hall."

Right now was the best chance to have everyone in one place – along with a lot of cameras – and solve things once and for all. The mayor and my team were still making their way out the building, and the journalists, being eager for the first scoop, were crowding them, asking plenty of questions. Amazingly, the mayor was obliging them, though he wasn't telling them all the details. But the fact that his missing niece was walking behind him spurred lots of camera clicks and shouting.

Now I brought them something else to fuss over. Abyssal arrived with Triumph and Miss Militia trailing behind. Dauntless, Assault, and Battery were trying to secure the scene as well, along with some of the Wards. It looked like everyone was here right now, although most of them looked like they were there to keep New Wave in check. Even though everyone on my team was cooperating, as Brandish was reminding them all.

I think Triumph was, thankfully, still on my side and convincing his team not to take down Abyssal for kidnapping their boss, but his teammates weren't having it.

Dauntless floated above and put himself between Abyssal and the PRT troops escorting the mayor with his arclance held out. "Triumph. Master prompt sigma three, lemon sherbet pie."

Triumph stopped. "Response, kappa seven, steel crosswire weld. I'm not mastered, Dauntless. You know who that is," he said, pointing at the Mayor.

"Yeah. I also know who that is," Dauntless responded, pointing at Calvert.

"I think the question we should be asking is if the girl knows who he is," Triumph said, this time pointing at Dinah, who was being shielded by her parents.

Abyssal presented Coil to them. That is, held them by the neck so everyone could get a clear look at him. Everyone hesitated when they saw him dangling helplessly, except Dinah. The girl cowered behind her parents even more. With the threat of a battle, the journalists had quieted down. Many people heard Dinah saying, "No, no, no more questions!"

"Dinah? Do you know this man?" her father asked.

"He kept me locked up after they tied you up. He kept asking me questions," she said. "After I got out, he put me away again before I could get home." Tears started to well up in her eyes as she latched on to her father's shirt and buried her face in it.

Dauntless hovered there, trying to absorb the information, looking unsure.

"Still think everyone's Mastered?" Triumph challenged him.

Dauntless rounded on Abyssal. "Let go of the Director," he said.

I obliged. Director Calvert dropped to the ground on all fours, wheezing. When he caught his breath, he shouted at the PRT troops, "What are you waiting for? Arrest them! He's gone rogue!"

The Mayor responded first. "No, you idiots. Arrest him!" he shouted while pointing at Calvert. "He's responsible for kidnapping my niece!"

Dauntless and Velocity maintained defensive positions, but didn't move. "All I know is that you're working with someone who kidnapped the Director," he said, directing his gaze at Abyssal.

"Sorry, but I'm going to have to side with Triumph on this one," Battery said.

"What?" Dauntless said in surprise.

"I recognize her. We rescued her from Coil's secret lair, just over a month ago, though it was mostly New Wave's effort. We were mostly there for clean-up. I know she was escorted to the PRT base for treatment and possible addiction to Tinkertech drugs."

"Yeah, I remember too," Assault added. "Is that her? How could nobody manage a positive ID after we took her in? The basic missing child search should have got a match right away."

"A month ago. You know that my niece has been missing since March?" the Mayor asked. "Why was I not informed that she'd been found?"

"Do you have ANY idea what we've been going through? You knew where our daughter was and you did nothing?" Mrs. Alcott shouted angrily.

"We didn't identify her right away. She was unconscious and, uh, in pretty bad condition," Assault said defensively.

Miss Militia nodded. "I remember the report. She was handed to the medical team, and transferred to a dedicated facility before she woke up. It was unusually fast, to be honest, but it didn't break protocol. Console, please look up report number CR0119943837-028 and tell me when facial recognition was run on her."

There was some muttering on the radio that I didn't hear clearly, but obviously all the Protectorate members heard it. This time, Dauntless turned on the Director as well. "Why the hell would you place a delay on child victim identification?"

"WEDGDG protocol. It's classified," Calvert said. "All of this is a setup. If you let me back to my office, I can explain to those who have clearance. Now anyone who doesn't help arrest these villains will be suspended for insubordination."

"Suspend me now, then." Triumph called his bluff and stepped forward. The others were similarly hesitant to move.

"Uh... Master/Stranger protocols still on?" Aegis asked cautiously. As the oldest and Wards leader, he didn't know what to do with his own group of young capes.

Triumph shook his head. "If we're lucky, it's the Director that needs them."

The mayor spoke once more. "I'll tell you what he needs. Handcuffs. Well, what are you waiting for?" he said to the police officers.

With Calvert and everybody else being taken into custody, the rest was now up to Brandish and actual legal efforts. Hopefully the police would actually do their jobs.

That let me put more focus on to Princess and Dragon. I still didn't have the full picture of what was happening on their end. She was still working on the computers, most of which looked like they were busy copying copious numbers of files or loading things. Princess was finally sitting back and drinking some coffee, monitoring the progress on all the screens. At least she wasn't running around frantically any more.

"Princess. Coil secured. Give me the full story?"

"Finally, some fucking good news," she said. "Well, I still can't do much to help Dragon before Errant arrives in Toronto, and I'll have to be hands-on then. What do you want to know?"

"Dragon. When?"

"It was just slightly after I broke through the PRT servers to get some more evidence," she said. "At first, I got booted out, and Dragon stopped talking. I thought she was just annoyed at me because, you know, she doesn't want me to steal stuff from the government, you know? But it was more than that. I realized she was getting hacked."

A cyberattack. Against Dragon.

Why?

No, wrong question.

"How?"

"First off, there's something you need to know. Dragon isn't a person. She's an AI," Princess explained. "So, yeah. You think it was crazy to try to hack Dragon's systems before? Elevate that to insane."

Okay. So Dragon, who was not only the world's most powerful Tinker, was also an AI. Did the Dragonslayers really have the capability to actually hurt her? They barely slowed her down, and for the most part seemed like a sideshow that occasionally vandalized her equipment. Nobody really considered them a true threat.

Was there a hacker anywhere in the world who could possibly harm Dragon? Especially now that I knew she was an AI, so she could literally operate faster than any human. The Yangban, maybe? Had China just added another cape, a tinker or technopath to their ranks? No, that didn't make sense. Dragon never acted against China directly; they benefited from her inventions, especially when they ignored Canadian patent law anyway.

"How?" I repeated.

"Yeah, exactly what I thought. But I started to realize that Dragon's 'connection issues' was actually her, glitching out. She's basically been Mastered – sort of. She's been programmed with a few restrictions. For one, even entertaining the idea of AI is off-limits. She gets a sudden bout of amnesia if it crosses her mind. I've been snooping on her the entire time I've been living in here, but I thought I would have had more time to figure her out."

"Dragonslayers. More powerful?"

Princess shook her head. "This isn't a matter of taking over Dragon's systems. The Dragonslayers managed to attack Dragon herself. There's no way they could have possibly maintained an attack against her; all she needed to do was cut off all connections and purge her systems. It also doesn't seem like they were physically with Dragon, wherever her program is stored. The IP trace wasn't anywhere close."

"Tech cape? Tinker?" I was trying to figure out the possibilities. Nobody was truly invincible – Alexandria, the invincible superhero, had been injured by the Siberian, after all. Dragon may have been a cybernetic equivalent of Alexandria, but she, too, could have had some particular weakness to some specific cape.

"That's always a possibility, like a software tinkering specialist that could make a hyper-adaptive virus or trojan. But most of the… malfunction and damage I was seeing to Dragon seemed to come from the inside out. She didn't have a chance. I think it's some kind of built-in killswitch. It's similar to her inability to think about AI. Whoever originally created her put some kind of… emergency delete button. And the Dragonslayers got the key to the back door."

If the Dragonslayers had some kind of special access to Dragon's backdoors and restrictions - well, it didn't seem so strange any more. Why these super-hacker villains were so good at targeting Dragon but could barely steal a few bucks from the bank. They didn't have to be hyper-competent hackers when they had the keys to the kingdom.

Of course, publicly, the Dragonslayers always claimed they were heroes, and that Dragon was secretly evil. Having worked with her, I doubted it. And the fact that they used stolen equipment from Dragon to steal more things instead of, well, hacking – it should have been obvious they weren't as talented as they claimed; that their "white hat" hacking was just an excuse for incompetence.

But that didn't solve the problem. In fact, it presented an even greater one. If the Dragonslayers simply deleted Dragon instead of overpowering her… then I doubted they had the skill to fix her if they had done irreparable damage. It took no skill to hit an off switch.

"Can we save her?" Possibly the most important question of the day.

She didn't answer right away. "Maybe. I have a few ideas. But it also depends a lot on what Errant manages to get out of the Dragonslayers."

Back in Brockton Bay, things were wrapping up. Mostly. Calvert was bound and handcuffed, and marched into a regular police paddy wagon. I swarmed bots under the vehicle, to keep track of it in case he made another escape attempt. Sundancer was also back in custody. Purity had given up, and allowed herself to be taken into custody as well.

Unfortunately, the police over near Purity's house had gotten the message that New Wave were labeled villains, but hadn't gotten the rest of the story. Laserdream and Glory Girl were also arrested. Thankfully Princess and I had both managed to give them a quick heads-up, and they knew to turn themselves in quietly until it was sorted out.

Now came the hard part. Actually getting Calvert convicted.

As a PRT director, the PRT itself would want to save face by quietly burying the issue instead of giving Calvert the spotlight in court. And because of that, they wouldn't be keen on quickly reversing his decisions and orders. Not publicly, at least. Having been declared villains by said director, our words wouldn't carry as much weight in the case against him.

Not surprisingly, everyone was being escorted to the police station. Laserdream and Glory Girl might take longer because they would have to be transferred between states. The rest of New Wave was doing better, cooperating with police. Although they were having trouble providing anything more than their own testimony, because the PRT troops had stripped them of their phones, radios, and cameras.

They weren't the only ones working the case. Already, I could see that several lawyers with PRT badges were already walking into the foyer of the BBPD building before Calvert even arrived. And at the outskirts of my range, I could see backup Protectorate and PRT forces coming from other cities.

This was going to be a clusterfuck that I really hope Brandish was prepared for.

Honestly, I didn't expect the PRT to play fair. New Wave might be branded villains permanently, or at least, until the case was over. The evidence they had taken might "accidentally" get lost. I knew how bureaucracy worked when they wanted to cover their own asses.

Thankfully, we still had backups. I hope.

"Princess. Backup evidence?"

"…fuck."

"Define 'fuck.'"

"Look, I was trying to save Dragon's life, okay? I had to delete all the local files and save as much of Dragon as I possibly could. I know she was backing them up in real-time on her main servers."

"Can you access?" We needed those videos. Not just to prove Calvert's guilt but also that we hadn't planted evidence and weren't Mastered.

"No. Maybe. I don't know," Princess sighed. "Our best chance is to try to revive Dragon. Her security is seriously powerful. And we need to rescue her if we're going to get access to those. Not that I'm saying we shouldn't try to revive her anyway – it would be an absolute disaster if the Birdcage stopped, you know, keeping the prisoners inside."

"We?"

"Yes. Us."

Author's Notes:

I made a big mistake: I started a game of Civilization VI. A few turns later and it's 3AM and my sleep