Chapter 9
Mechanics
"You know you don't have to do this," Kara said, around a hair tie she was holding between her teeth. She had just finished plaiting her hair back into a Dutch braid and was tying it off as Lena busied herself in the other room.
"Your sister said she needed me, I'm happy to oblige." The voice floated in, distracted.
"You don't have to say yes just because she's my sister." Kara, having finished with her hair, was now depressing the plunger on the French press, pouring the coffee into a travel thermos for Lena.
The blonde wasn't thrilled about taking Lena to one of Shurr's warehouses, it seemed like giftwrapping the canary and hand-delivering it to that cat; the whole thing made her anxious. True, some of her anxiety was rooted in the very confusing and surprisingly strong feelings for the woman in the other room – feelings that seemed to have taken hold over night. Regardless, she was on high alert and determined to protect Lena at all costs, a task her sister seemed dead-set on complicating.
"I'm saying yes because she's your sister and because she carries a gun." Lena walked out from the bedroom, running a hand through her sleek dark hair before shaking it out and Kara almost dropped the coffee.
Seeing the CEO in plaid pajamas was one thing, seeing couture causal Lena Luthor was quite another. She was bewitching in skin-tight, black skinny jeans that pooled slightly before disappearing into onyx leather, studded ankle boots with an obvious heel. Through an over-sized, purposefully distressed, black sweater, Kara could see the faint lines of a cropped, nearly-black halter. Though she wasn't wearing any necklaces, Lena's fingers were stacked with rings and numerous earrings trailed their way up and around the curve of each ear. She stepped aside and carefully wove a soft black knit scarf around her neck before shrugging into a gunmetal grey, mid-thigh length, gabardine jacket with a high funnel collar that, though modest in appearance, most likely cost more than Kara's rent.
Her make-up followed the dark, distressed theme, though more subtly than Kara had ever seen it, with soft gray dusted around black lined eyes. Along with long dark lashes, the look made the icy green of Lena's irises all the more startling. The Luthor's lips were a bit darker – a matte, dusky plum, rather than their usual blood red – and Kara couldn't stop her gaze from lingering over them a bit longer than strictly necessary.
"That's what you packed?" Kara sputtered, slack-jawed. The woman looked like something dangerous had escaped the pages of a fashion spread. She could feel something warm and hollow rise in her stomach and pull pleasantly as she looked the Luthor over. She was terrifying like this, and Kara could do little more than gulp and flutter lashes.
"And why shouldn't it be?" Lena answered absent-mindedly, cuffing the jacket above the elbow and pushing up the sweater sleeve to meet it. "The team in my apartment didn't give me a lot of time to pack, so I just grabbed a few comfortable favorites."
"This is comfortable?" Kara's tone was a bit sharper than she intended and she backpedaled momentarily, "I just mean you look amazing, intimidating, for sure, but amazing."
"You have your super suit, I have mine," she said plainly, crossing to Kara and placing lithe fingers at the lapel of her button-down shirt. "Dressing like this, and the way I do at work, the clean lines, the jewelry, the dramatic hair and makeup, they're just another form of armor." She explained lightly, while buttoning the three top buttons of Kara's shirt, effectively hiding the bright crimson and blue symbol of her suit.
Kara, for her part, was temporarily distracted by Lena's fingers working against her chest, and her breath came in halting, awkward gusts. The gesture was so stunningly banal and domestic, yet so perfectly intimate, that for a moment Kara forgot that they were in the throes of a potentially life-threatening plot and allowed herself a instant to consider a future in which such gestures were regular and commonplace. It was a pleasant fantasy; one that faded slightly as the dark haired woman's hands retreated.
"These clothes are just a costume." Lena finished, ensuring Kara's collar was lying flat before stepping back to appraise her work, "Albeit, one I quite like, but a costume none-the-less."
"And the glasses-and-pajamas look?" Kara smiled, catching the thread of the conversation again.
"That is the real Lena, I assure you." She smiled wryly, "Given a choice, I would rather slouch around town in a pair of jeans, and a t-shirt, but then I would lose that threatening edge all the gossip magazines love to write about."
"Well, not that this look isn't, well, sort of stunning, but I definitely like the real Lean Luthor." Kara colored slightly, adjusting her glasses.
"I appreciate that." She lifted the coffee from Kara's hand and slipped on a pair of aviator sunglasses before crossing to the apartment door, "Shall we?"
"Sure." Kara mused, smiling a bit wider than she could help.
The sleek black town car pulled up at the warehouse twenty minutes later, greeted by an impatient Alex. The redhead pulled open the door before the vehicle had even come to a stop and she led the two women deep into the warehouse. The DEO team had wasted no time setting up light fixtures and partitions, creating an atmosphere that more closely resembled an archeological dig than it did a black site infiltration.
"Thank you for coming, I needed to know what we're dealing with," Alex pushed aside a curtain of plastic sheeting they had rigged around the control center housing the tesla coil and mechanical mystery they'd discovered earlier. "We could have called in our people, but given the nature of this tech and Shurr's involvement with LuthorCorp, we thought it might be faster to go straight to the source." Alex stood, hands on hips, pausing before leading them to the mechanical monstrosity they'd uncovered.
"Well, I don't know if you could call me 'the source,' but I can certainly recognize our tech, and I'm happy to do whatever I can to help."
"That's what I was hoping you'd say," Alex started moving again, pushing through another plastic barrier and coming to stop in front of the towering metal structure, "because we may be a bit out of our depth here."
The CEO stopped dead in her tracks and Kara bumped gracelessly into her, only stopping when she felt the other woman lean back, almost swooning.
"Lena?" Kara caught her with ease as her knees buckled slightly, and wrapped an arm around the woman's mid-section to keep her upright.
"No..." the youngest Luthor murmured softly, .
"What is it?" Alex pressed, and Kara motioned for her to stand down for a moment.
Lena staggered forward slightly, extending a hand to graze the jutting interlocking metal. It shone in the faint light, polished silver and green, shining like some grotesque beacon in the hull of the dark warehouse.
"My company wasn't always the powerful corporation it is today," the dark-haired woman spoke softly, her breath fogging the sheen of the cold material under her fingers. "Lex, in the early stages of his megalomaniacal anti-Super crusade started buying up dozens of companies, each highly specialized in their fields. It wasn't until LuthorCorp had become one of the largest manufacturing and fabrication conglomerates that any of us started to question his obsessive purchasing spree. We came to learn that each of the companies he strategically acquired was responsible for crafting different parts of a very specific piece of tech he was developing for personal purposes."
Kara breathed a short, shocked breath, "Lex's warsuit!" She had heard horrible tales recounting the destructive power of Lex Luthor's kryptonite tempered suit, designed for the express purpose of crippling her cousin. She shuddered involuntarily.
"Lex had teamed up with others hellbent on bringing down Superman – aliens, sentient computers, I'm not really sure who or what they were – but during their time together, my brother developed and fine-tuned his suit using every piece of knowledge he could get his hands on. Solar engines, blasters, and advanced neural network, internal power converters, the suit was a death machine forged from kryptonite and hatred; a lethal shell with a monster inside."
Kara stepped forward and placed a gentle hand on Lena's shoulder, she could feel the slight flinch at the unexpected contact, but her hand was immediately warmed by Lena's own and she stayed, silent and supportive.
The mechanical marvel towered over them, a staggering 15 feet of cruel steel and glass. It was structured much like a suit might be, with a generalized anthropomorphic design featuring two legs, clean joints and hydraulic piston rods snaked with cables, and two massive arms, one of which terminated in a rudimentary three-pronged claw, while the other seemed to be an articulated blasting cannon of some sort. At the heart of the monstrosity was a web of metal, framing tempered glass casing where a pilot might sit. Everything was polished to a high sheen – all of it articulated and oiled – grotesquely beautiful in its threatening, gleaming perfection.
The youngest Luthor pushed forward a bit. A ladder had been shunted off to one side and she pulled it open, carefully climbing up to get a better look at the heart of the beast. Kara watched as Lena ran an exploratory hand along the seam of the cockpit, until her fingers found purchase and she twisted a latch, receiving a satisfying click in exchange for her efforts. There came a shorty hiss of air and the glass portal began to lift away.
"This is not my brother's warsuit, but it was definitely built to take advantage of every aspect Lex designed to cause mayhem. This, is a mechasuit, meant for a single pilot." Lena shifted from the ladder and made a move to climb into the mechanical giant.
"Lena, wait," Kara called up to her. She looked back at Alex who merely nodded, and after a moment's hesitation, the blonde rose slowly, hovering in midair a few feet from the Luthor. She was unaccustomed to the sensation of flight while decked out in her khakis and button-down, something about it felt odd and disjointed, but she refused to let Lena go poking around in some literal death trap without supervision. She was treated to a strange look from the Luthor, a mix of something akin to begrudging warmth and Kara's heart beat, stupidly, noisily, in her chest. "Be careful."
"I always am." Lena answered, giving a jovial little salute, before shifting to get a better grip and lowering herself into the cockpit of the machine.
"Liar." Kara countered, hovering near the raised glass shielding.
Lena slipped into the compartment; it was surprisingly stark, with no visible controls save a few switches. Kara hovered closer, gripping the edge of the shielding, her breath shallow, eyes wide and darting. Lena plucked at a hose-like device, tipped with a large, blunt needle, which snaked around the back of the chair.
"My brother developed a neural network that he built it into the armored spine of the warsuit. This mechasuit seems to have a similar mechanism. It wires the suit directly into the brain and allows the pilot to drive using thought and reflex rather than mechanics."
"That's not creepy at all," Kara heard Alex intone, under her breath.
Lena flicked a few cursory switches and the blonde instinctively tensed, waiting for the thing to lurch to life, for the fight to begin, but it remained silent, dormant. The youngest Luthor knit her eyebrows and rose from the compartment, scaling the ladder and circling the mechasuit, scanning its exterior.
"The same converter mechanics built into Lex's warsuit are mounted on the mechasuit, but it seems to have no real power source." Lena stood for a moment, "The suit is sound from an engineering standpoint, but it's dormant without a battery."
"What did Lex use for his?"
"My brother found a solar battery, lifted from another planet, but this doesn't utilize the same method." She knocked on the chest of the mechasuit, "It seems my brother's deal with Shurr didn't extend quite as far as Shurr might have liked."
Alex shifted thoughtfully, hands still firmly on her hips, "Miss Luthor, Kara mentioned you were applying for patents to protect a geomagnetic energy project."
"I was."
"And Shurr flew off the handle when you wouldn't sell him those patents." Kara supplied.
"Could something like that power the suit? Wirelessly?" Alex posed the question and the three women shared a knowing look.
"It could, but without my research, Shurr couldn't develop a working prototype."
"I'm pretty sure that hasn't stopped him from trying." Alex shifted and led the two women back through the maze of partitions, toward the coil. "It looks like Shurr was pressing forward with his attempts." The redhead lifted the plastic sheeting and paused watching as the Luthor stepped forward and ran her hands across the control panels, traced the electrical burns scarring the coil, circled the coolant tank, growing more concerned with each step.
"This is all LuthorCorp tech and my design. But the execution has obviously been corrupted; he's missing the vital piece of my research that would make this functional." Lena pulled the clutch atop on of the levers and paused to listen to the whir and fizzle of the machine, as Alex had earlier. "If he manages to correct his error, or somehow filches my work, he could, with a centrally located generator, create enough energy to power a whole army of mechasuits."
"I was really hoping you wouldn't say that." The redheaded agent winced.
"Why?" Kara turned to her sister and after a moment of unanswered silence, repeated, more insistently, "Why, Alex?"
"Because we found three more warehouses. This must have been a prototype; the others each housed more than thirty of these suits. Shurr's been busy and you, Miss Luthor, seem to be at the center of every one of his exploits.
A/N: This was definitely one of those "move the plot along" chapters, but don't worry, there's more fluff and action coming down the pipeline very soon! Thank you so much for your comments and feedback, they mean so much and really help spur me on to write more! You're all the best!
