They copied all they could follow, but they couldn’t copy my mind,
And I left ‘em sweating and stealing a year and a half behind.
Rudyard Kipling, The Mary Gloster
Legacy Forge Airship
November 9th, 1993
“Ulibalobliabloo,” said the Titanium Tyrant, and Catherine Balog, age 1, laughed.
He wore a bright orange prison jumpsuit, having not yet bothered to change out of it. It was augmented only by a gunbelt strapped around his waist, which held a disintegrator pistol.
He tossed her up in the air again and caught her. “Ulbiliquiob!” he said. “Now you! Try it!”
She gurgled and looked around. The airship’s nursery had only the necessities - one door, one window, one soft pseudo-grass carpet, and one hand-carved wooden crib that was secretly a killer robot - though there was also a hunting mosaic on the ceiling.
“Yes, that’s right! It’s not like it is on the ground!” Rocking his daughter in his arms, he moved over next to the window. “See? We’re in the air! Like you are when you fly? Only we’re all flying!”
The window - well out of reach from the ground or from the crib, in spite of its impenetrable panes - had an elaborate brass frame, covered with tiny metallic curls designed to look like the thorns of roses, chosen to go with the forest-green carpeting that covered the floor. Tiny heads topped the thorns, which with sufficient care (and possibly a microscope) could be identified as the faces of the hunters on the mosaic above. Outside the window you could see clouds, above and below with the blue sky fading out into the distance.
“Dad.” Elizabeth Balog slammed the door open, eyes narrow. She moved with the grace and refinement of a Sherman tank and stopped with the precision of an atomic clock and was seven years (“And nine months!”) old.
“Lizzy!” He grinned down at her. “How’s my little girl? You been getting along with your little brother?” Catherine squawked, and the Tyrant turned back to her. “Uliballibloo?”
“Dad, some of your henchmen are here. They want to talk to you.”
“Aww. I don’t get twenty minutes with my girls? Oh, you want to go down?” He carefully lowered Catherine to the floor and let her toddle, then stepped over to Lizzy to ruffle her dark hair. “Who?”
“Prudence and Paragon.”
“Lizzy!” His voice sharpened. “I taught you better than that. Prudence and Paragon aren’t henchmen. Prudence is my ally and co-worker, and Paragon is my vassal. They’re supervillains like me.”
“They’re supervillains who work for you.”
“Yes, but you’ll never get anywhere talking to them like they’re henchmen.” He grinned at his older daughter. “Look, watch the cameras tonight and I’ll show you how to talk to supervillains.”
“All right.” Lizzy hugged her father’s legs, tossed a dismissive glance at her little sister, and left the room.
“All right. And now, little Cat?” He picked her up, provoking a squawk of protest, and tucked her into her crib. “I’m sorry, but I need to go. It’s time for me to put my game face on.”
The airship’s strategy room held twenty-eight chairs, scattered throughout the broad space so no one could accuse his neighbor of jostling him. The ceiling above them showed a perfect video of the night sky and the support columns along the walls were covered with entwined snakes; the dozens and hundreds of small screens between the columns each showed a different location down on the ground where the Tyrant’s enemies plotted.
Beloved, you should be here by now.
The Gorgon Queen leaned back in chair number thirteen, luxurious leather, her face perfectly calm. Behind the mirrored sunglasses she let people think suppressed her power her eyes scanned the room from one supervillain to the next. Her costume was armored, she was armed with tinker weapons built by Mechanos himself, and half the people in the room could still kill her before she could react.
Solaris, dark and proud and fierce in chair nine, was the youngest power mimic in the world, though few knew it; a few of the world’s strongest capes might have matched his firepower. Steelstorm’s grease-stained work clothes hid half again as many weapons as her armor did, and nine out of every ten of the mechanical soldiers patrolling the airship’s rooms and corridors answered to the Tyrant only through him. Blue-eyed and red-clad Winterblood could freeze over entire cities and had fought the Atlantic Six alone, and cool, cold Legate Livia of the Ten Thousand Perfect Rifles still wore her RSI uniform unchanged since Salo’s fall, and could kill or perfect with a single touch.
Then her husband came on stage, and every pair of eyes in the room turned to him.
“Gentleman. Ladies.” He nodded to Livia. “Legate.”
The Queen’s eyes narrowed, her heart beginning to beat faster. Her husband wasn’t wearing any armor, not even the lightest; a ceremonial titanium breastplate was the closest concession he made to defense. The flowing cape - surely he had some sort of defense net in it. The ebony walking stick - there had to be a concealed death ray in it somewhere. The golden circlet that kept his graying hair out of his eyes -
No, she realized as she scanned him. No, nothing. Twenty-seven superpowered murderers - twenty-seven criminals with prison cells or electric chairs waiting for them - twenty-seven of the best in their business, many of whom he had just insulted, and he - unprotected.
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He walked to the podium; of the twenty-eight chairs around the room, only one was empty.
“Welcome to the new world,” said the man the New York Times called the Titanium Tyrant.
He nodded gravely to Zero, who sat in chair twenty-four near the back of the war room, watchful over her brother Pyre. “Zero. A pleasure to see you here. How did your last battle with Charioteer go?”
The entire right side of her face was one bruise. “You can tell.”
“Livia, would you care to share your encounter with Radiant for the table?”
Livia made a swift cutting gesture.
“And Mechanos…”
The Tyrant paused. Looked at the empty chair.
“Mechanos is not with us today. Mechanos is in San Carlos Correctional wrapped in a Faraday cage of a cell, stripped of all devices he might use to escape, including his limbs.”
Blitz flexed his own metal right hand.
“There was a time,” the Tyrant said, “when we set out to mend the world. The old world was dying, lashing out in its spasms and bringing death and devastation with it, and we would build a new one, whatever the cost. Laws that stood in our way, customs, ‘morality’ - all would go, a worthy price for our freedom and for our glory. And yet we failed. We -”
“You failed,” said Winterblood, calm and cruel. “The old men failed.” He rose to meet the Tyrant’s eyes with a sleek smile. “The younger generation has not.”
“The younger generation has not -” He was speaking at exactly the same time as the Tyrant, the Tyrant echoing his words, precisely as he said them, with the same tone.
“What -” “What -” Winterblood flinched. Never could bear mockery… “Stop that -”
Now the Tyrant was speaking, and Winterblood was echoing him.
Winterblood raised his hand, the hand that could freeze cities, and the sound made by the shaped charges strapped to the bottom of his chair combined with the magnetic containment field in the chamber’s floor and a plasma sterilization beam descending from the night-black ceiling was CRACKTHRUMSHHH.
There weren’t even ashes. Only a few small scorch marks showed that there had ever been more than twenty-six supervillains in the audience.
“You son of a bitch!” The man seated next to Winterblood leaped to his feet. “I’m going to kill you -”
The Tyrant gestured with his cane. CRACKTHRUMSHHH.
There was one fewer chair and one fewer occupant.
“I’d like you all,” he said, “to look under your seats, so you can know you’ll survive the night. I know that seven more of you are plotting against me - especially you, Livia - but by the time your plans have reached fruition, we will be as kings and you will have faith in me.” He smiled in sheer exultant arrogance. “No, the stories are not exaggerations. I can predict the future, and I knew exactly who planned to attack me tonight. Jesus marked his betrayer with a kiss; I prefer high explosives.”
Just’s face turned white.
“Not yet, Justin. Hold off for now.”
The Tyrant looked around the room. They were shuffling, quietly checking. Tower was moving his chair. Four-hundred-year-old Prudence Cartwright was raising an eyebrow at him. “Now, where was I before that little interruption? Oh, yes. How we have been wronged. Fifty, thirty, twenty years, years of bare defeats and shattered victories, and we have abandoned our age of glory. Once we dreamed of greatness! Once we thought we would rule the world. And now we hope for money, and we hope for revenge, and that is all we dare hope for.”
The Tyrant shook his head.
“Every tragedy starts with a mistake, and that was ours. Look around you! Twenty-five supervillains. A single supervillain can defeat a single hero. A single villain cannot defeat Six. Twenty-five, against the Atlantic Six… They have mocked your plans, disregarded your gifts, laughed at your dreams. We have been... dismissed. We will be dismissed no longer.
“Let me be clear: We are not gathered as thieves, but as conquerors! In seventy-two hours, the United Nations will recognize the existence of a new world power. In five years, we will have our first continent. In twenty - who knows? We may dice for nations. If you want money, you may take it and begone. But those who remember their dreams will not.”
The Gorgon Queen glanced at a narrow-eyed young man whose armor was the color of a stormy sky, meeting his eyes over her glasses. He froze.
“There is only one more thing I wish to say.” His eyes remained fixed on the same man. “Stormhawk, please remove your hand from your pocket? Carefully. And without letting go of that phone.”
The Gorgon Queen gestured towards her husband. “Pass it up.”
Stormhawk tossed it to the Tyrant, his frozen gaze growing more and more horrified.
The Titanium Tyrant caught it. “Interesting. Custom-designed, I see. Not just a normal cell phone. Tinker-made… I can see the - second - Smith’s insights. Recording, storage, transmission designed to punch through jamming… I assume you had the Atlantic Six on the line?”
Obedient to the Queen’s mental command, Stormhawk nodded slowly.
“Rather a shame, then. It would’ve been disastrous if they’d heard that speech instead of the Cooking Channel.”
He turned back to his wife. “Beloved, would you kindly take him to a cell?
The Queen nodded and rose to leave, Stormhawk following her. “Thank you.”
As she left, she heard him continue.
“Now that our spy is out of the room, we can discuss the details. My plan can be divided into three phases. First, the seizure of the island of Saint-Andrews…”
- - -
“I do like winning,” said Paragon, raising his glass to the Queen’s.
“So do we all,” she said.
They drank.
“Damn glad to be back on track.” Paragon sighed. “Bigger armies, bigger stakes… reminds me of New Mexico all over again.”
“Well, this time we have a superweapon,” said the Queen.
“Pleased to hear it.” Paragon looked at his glass. “Other than the kid, you mean?”
“Oh yes. Care to see it?”
“Why not?”
The Gorgon Queen nodded. It was only a short walk to the empty laboratory; the illusion of abundance in the Legacy Forge had been hard-won, but every cubic foot on the battleship had to be paid for in lift, and Livia and the Royal Court were far from the only supervillains to bring cadres of their own loyal henchmen with them.
“So, what exactly are you going to threaten to destroy the world with?”
She turned towards him and met his gaze over the top of her glasses.
He froze, completely, and, since he was already moving slightly and all orders from his brain had shut down, his body continued its inevitable arc to the ground.
“Stand up,” she said, and he did.
“Did you think we wouldn’t learn?”
She walked around him, drumming her fingers against her knife’s sheath.
“We know you’ve betrayed us. Minerva talked you around, so she’d have a mole in the Royal Court. Is this true?”
“Yes,” he whispered, something in the back of his throat trying to choke it off.
“She met your price, and you had one.”
“Yes.”
“Sandor would never have believed it. Thirty years - I love the man, he’s a genius, if I tried this it would have been Corax the Conqueror all over again, but the man trusts, and in our business that’s never wise. You’re his right arm, and after thirty years he still shouldn’t’ve thought you were a friend.”
She smiled a merciless smile. “But he never learns. Just too… nice. So I’m here. Sometimes I feel I’m as much a maid as a wife. My job is to clean up after his mistakes.”
She pressed pen and paper into his nerveless fingers.
“Write a full confession, describing every one of your interactions with the new Smith, the Survivor, other members of the Atlantic Six, or any other group associated with the International Association of Superheroes or any national government leading up to this betrayal, as quickly as you can without sacrificing legibility. Then place it on the table, walk into the incinerator, and use your powers to cut your own head off.”
As the pen started to scratch across the paper, she paused.
“Oh - since I do know you’re in there somewhere, you should understand that Helen won’t want. I take my responsibilities as godmother seriously. But she’s better off if traitors aren’t a part of her life. We wouldn’t want her to learn from your example.”
The door closed behind her, and the lock clicked shut.