Chapter Twenty-One: Technomagick
I watched the red-headed terrorist/mercenary twist the knob and kick the door open, then dive to one side just as something small and silvery flashed through the doorway at throat level. A moment later I heard the sound of a metal object striking a concrete wall, and then again as the projectile fell to the floor.
"Apologies, Anarchy," said Black Lotus's voice from inside the cell. "I was already releasing it before I recognized you."
"I knew something of the sort might happen," Anarchy said calmly as she rose to her feet. "But I chanced it—I'm not sure how good the soundproofing is in this area, so I didn't want to yell through a thick metal door to let you know who I was."
Black Lotus emerged from the cell, still wearing the flowing green thing she'd been wearing yesterday night (or possibly just another copy of it?). Anyway, it had various little tears and stains suggesting she'd gotten some rough treatment from the invaders of the brownstone base. There was also a bruise on the left side of her jaw, but she seemed quite composed as she said, "You could have knocked in Morse code, though."
"Didn't know who was in there, and didn't even realize you knew Morse," Anarchy said with a bare trace of apology in her tone. "Few people worry about studying such slow signaling methods in today's world of computers and cell phones."
Without showing any change of expression, Black Lotus somehow radiated a sense of quiet reproof as she said gently, "Not all of us grew up in lands where the modern toys were so plentiful as they are in New York. And sometimes one wishes to send a silent message without drawing attention. Via eyeblinks, for instance."
"True enough," Anarchy agreed. "The beauty of Morse is that it's so flexible."
Black Lotus moved across the room to where her projectile had landed on the floor. After it had stopped moving, I'd been able to see it was a smallish shuriken.
"One question," I said, doing my best to sound humble. "Anarchy said they searched her for weapons. They missed a couple of things—mostly small, nonmetallic items, I gather—but how did they miss this? Where did you hide it?"
Black Lotus seemed amused. "If you don't know that trick, I'm not going to enlighten you today. I don't know you well enough."
I did my best to conjure up a rueful smile to show I wasn't offended. Meanwhile, Fortescue had been working on the last closed door in the line of five in one wall. Now something clicked and he stepped sideways, saying softly, "So how do you ladies want to announce yourselves to whoever is inside this one?"
Since Black Lotus had gently criticized Anarchy's method—even while giving an 'apology' for the shuriken at the same time—she realized as quickly as the rest of us that she needed to give us a demonstration of her preferred approach. No one said anything as she glided forward and rapped on the door with the heel of her left hand. It took me a few seconds to decide she was signaling in English but using International Morse, instead of the earlier Morse code developed in the United States; then I was able to translate in my head.
BLACK LOTUS. STAY CALM.
Having done that, she twisted the handle and shoved the door open.
The result was sheer anticlimax. Yvonne, the dusky-skinned maid I'd met at the poker table the night before, was in the room. So was a fat woman with bleached blonde hair and an apron over her dress. A stranger to me, but I quickly gathered she was called "Mrs. Jarroway" and she was the household cook in the Zaladane/Cathode headquarters; no superpowers, no costume, and apparently no fighting skills. Neither of them had tried to do anything violent as the door swung open. Black Lotus and Anarchy were reasonably polite as they spoke to their employers' domestics for a few minutes to learn any scraps of information the two might have gleaned, but I could tell they didn't expect these two to take an active role in the breakout from wherever-the-heck we were.
Yvonne and Mrs. Jarroway didn't add much to our store of knowledge. Fortescue added some more. He knew that any superpowered agents of the Zaladane/Cathode partnership were being kept under special restraints in a room which he had not been permitted to enter. He had heard talk about the two partners being interrogated; he claimed that they had recently finished with Cathode—at least for today—and shoved her into a separate room. He borrowed the shuriken from Black Lotus and scratched a crude map.
"One guard outside the door," he said. "When I strolled past, it was Pavane. Blond lady with a whip; no powers—I think."
"Ah, her," Black Lotus said reminiscently. "Not a serious problem. And that's just down this corridor and around a corner to the left?"
Fortescue nodded. "I kinda got the impression they don't think they have any further use for Cathode, but are just keeping her isolated on general principle. I don't think Pavane seriously expects any trouble to break the monotony of her guard duty. Titania, down at the other end of this level, is probably more serious about her duty, but she shouldn't be able to see anything happening to Pavane. Nor hear it, if it's quick and quiet."
Black Lotus asked, "How's the footing out there?"
Fortescue looked blank. She prompted: "Carpet, hardwood, concrete? Clean, messy? Safe for bare feet?"
"Concrete in the corridors; concrete in the rooms," he said. "Just like in here. There are a few rugs, but none in the corridors. They do seem to keep the floors swept clean, near as I can tell. No broken glass, nothing like that."
Black Lotus balanced gracefully on her right leg while removing a sandal with a thick wooden heel from her left foot. When that was done, she switched legs and repeated the process. Barefoot, she glided silently across the room to the door connecting to the corridor, then paused before opening it.
"I signed a contract with Cathode. If I can do anything alone out there, I should be able to do it quietly and within ten minutes," she said, looking at Anarchy but really speaking to all of us. "If you hear loud noises, I was probably intercepted. If all is quiet, but I don't come back in ten minutes, then you must assume I'm somehow immobilized, perhaps unconscious or merely hiding in a closet to avoid detection . . . and then you will just have to use your own judgment in trying something else."
"Ten minutes," Anarchy agreed after a few seconds' thought. "All right—we'll sit tight for that long; doing our best to not draw attention."
Black Lotus nodded and eased the door open, then slipped out into the corridor, leaving the door ajar just a tad—presumably so we'd be sure to hear any screams, gunshots, or other signs of unpleasantness on this level. What we would do if we heard them was up in the air. Anarchy had suggested she had a bomb concealed on her person, but I didn't know any specifics about how powerful it was . . .
It didn't come to that. I was counting my heartbeats in an attempt to keep track of time. I estimated it had been six minutes and forty-five seconds (give or take a few seconds) when the door eased open and Black Lotus entered, moving as quietly as before, but this time she had Cathode over her shoulders in a fireman's carry. Cathode probably weighed at least as much as Black Lotus did; I was a bit surprised Lotus had that much upper-body strength. Her arms looked so slender . . . of course, mine didn't exactly bulge like a champion weightlifter's either, but I probably could have carried Cathode a fair distance myself. Perhaps Lotus had a special training regimen which had similar efficiency to Superia's exotic techniques for maximizing the power of mind over matter?
Anarchy and I moved forward and grabbed Cathode to lower her to the floor; Anarchy taking the shoulders and I the legs. Black Lotus hadn't asked for help with her burden, but she sure didn't object when she got it anyway. Cathode was still wearing the lumberjack-style clothes in which I'd last seen her.
It turned out Cathode was conscious, although too weak to stand. I hadn't realized at first because she'd been hanging limp over Lotus and keeping her eyes closed. (Presumably because she figured squirming around wouldn't make things any easier for her bearer.)
"Drugs," Black Lotus said, pointing to a fresh needle-mark on Cathode's forearm. "One of the more potent and experimental 'truth serums,' I gather; and perhaps a few other things to keep her listless. The lady still feels weak and uncoordinated."
"But I can talk," Cathode said faintly. "You all need to know things. I don't know who our captors are working for—someone female, I gather—but since they already know everything Z and I have been doing lately, there's no point in keeping it secret from the rest of you. And some stray bit of information might turn out to be vital in planning tactics, for all I know."
"Some time ago I became aware that a man called Vincent Stephens had been soliciting funds from the leaders of various organized crime outfits in New York City. Although the details of what he told each leader seemed to differ, my sources agreed that he was offering each investor a chance to get in on the ground floor of something frightfully innovative in computers. I became curious and tried to steal one of his modified computers from his office building, the Tempo, with my teleportation rays.
"I failed. The ray was blocked by something I could only describe as a very odd force field. It was extremely difficult to measure what was going on; which made me suspect the force field included energies from outside the range of the electromagnetic spectrum. That made me think of magic, and I finally happened to make contact with Zaladane, who was laying low after being reported dead in Antarctica. I think perhaps she really was dead for awhile—she refuses to speak of the details.
"At my urging, Zaladane arranged to visit a large party at which Vincent Stephens was also present. She watched him carefully, without speaking to him, and was struck by his resemblance to Stephen Strange, whom she says is the Sorcerer Supreme of Earth Dimension. But Vincent seemed totally lacking in the 'professional ethics' of the original. Z determined he had considerable mystic potential which he routinely used to override people's free will. She says such things happen more often than the typical civilian would believe, but usually the perpetrators are caught and chastised by Dr. Strange or other 'high-minded' sorcerers who frown on such heavy-handed use of power for personal gratification.
"We studied him further, and learned various interesting things. We were trying to decide whether a joint venture against the defenses around the Tempo was likely to be worth the risk of enraging a powerful wizard who might even be the Sorcerer Supreme. We didn't know exactly what he was doing with his equipment, so we kept holding off on that. Then the situation changed recently.
"Vincent Stevens is no longer alive. If he ever was—Z thinks he was some sort of magical construct; a hollow copy of Stephen Strange, now somehow dissolved. This created a better window of opportunity. As far as we could tell, the Sorcerer Supreme was taking very little interest in The Tempo, although it still was surrounded by powerful mystic wards which Vincent had set up to keep any half-competent mystic, psychic, or supernatural entity from intruding on a whim.
"So we put our contingency plan into action. The raw power of my teleportation ray never could have punched through the Tempo's wards—partly because of different 'wavelengths' involved, shall we say? And partly because if the defenses adjusted to block the energy of my ray, I wouldn't be able to 'see' how the magical field was shifting soon enough to compensate. Z could see it plainly, though, and cast spells to help counteract whatever the standing spells were automatically doing in their master's absence.
"Now I think our attackers must have known exactly what we were up to, and preferred to sit back and let us do the heavy lifting before they moved in and seized the spoils—one of Vincent Stephens's technomagick servers—for their own purposes. There's no honor among thieves nowadays," Cathode added dryly.
There was a long pause while everyone in her audience tried to digest all this. After a while, I inquired: "What are their purposes? Trying to dominate the computer industry with an unfair magical advantage, if they can mass-produce whatever this Vincent Stephens had done that was so special?"
Cathode shook her head, her long dark hair swinging wildly. "No, I'd say their ambitions go in a different direction. They asked me several questions about using teleportation technology to penetrate dimensional barriers. They also wondered about using the stolen technomagick server to help sift through different planes of existence in search of a particular target to then be retrieved by teleportation. I wasn't much help, I'm afraid," she added with an obvious lack of regret. "I just told them I'd never messed around with that sort of thing and wouldn't know where to begin. This old reality of ours is quite enough for me, without opening a can of worms by digging around in other odd corners of the multiverse hoping to strike gold . . ."
Anarchy said, "So they want to go treasure-hunting in the Worlds of If?"
"Or people-hunting," Fortescue said suddenly. "I've heard them talk about their Boss as if they're in occasional contact with her, but never meet her in person. What if she's stuck in some far-off reality and knows how to call home, but not how to come home? So she's making extravagant promises for how she will reward those who bring her back?"
Cathode nodded agreeably. "That would fit. They didn't say exactly that in my hearing, but it would certainly fit. I gather they already have some teleportation tech of their own, so they weren't counting on capturing my devices intact for whatever was on their agenda."
Black Lotus said to Cathode: "You are still my employer. What is the priority? To extricate ourselves from this underground lair as quickly as possible, or to assist your partner, or something else?"
Author's Note: Much of Cathode's lecture about Vincent Stephens and his building of "technomagick" servers in the Tempo, in an effort to do grandiose things which he couldn't do just by waving his hand and muttering a spell, refers to things which "really happened" in the Marvel Universe around 1993-1995, during David Quinn's run as writer on the "Doctor Strange" title of that era. Also there was a little follow-up to those matters in stories by a couple of subsequent writers who worked on that same series before it was cancelled, but I don't believe the real Doctor Strange ever took any special interest in the modified servers in the office building, although in the next-to-last issue of the series he vaguely mentioned plans to have the entire building demolished just to be on the safe side. (I don't think we know if it ever was demolished, come to think of it—we only know that he once said it would be!) I merely assume that Cathode and Zaladane were watching from the sidelines and that they managed to steal one of the many "technomagick" servers somewhere along the way, without Doctor Strange immediately becoming aware of it. (He had an awful lot of other things on his mind in that era).