A/N: Chap 20 review responses in my forums like normal. As for this chapter? Not gonna lie. I liked the Dragon interlude. Also, I apologize for the formatting. It just did not keep the original formating, so this was the best I could do.
Chapter Twenty-One: What Are Little Girls Made Of?
Signal Transmission successful. Elapsed time 14 minutes 5 seconds. Establishing systems control for NXCF-189 at 4:38 am on date February 1, of year 2011.
Suit diagnostics in process…...Complete.
Checking Positronic Matrix…...Complete.
Checking knowledge banks…...Complete.
Checking deduction schema…...Complete.
Checking long term planning architecture…...Complete.
Checking learning chunk processor…...Complete.
Checking base personality model…...Complete.
Checking language engine…...Complete.
Checking operation and access nodes…...Complete.
Checking observation framework…...Complete.
Checking complex social intelligence emulator… Complete.
Checking inspiration apparatus…...Complete.
Sensors online. Audio systems online. Thermal sensors online. Fuel lines intact. Variable Thrust Engines online. Sound baffle system online. Forcefield generators online.
For the fourteen minutes and five seconds it took to transition to the Mark 1 suit, Dragon, the most famous tinker in the world, ceased to exist. That first spark of intelligence that arose within the suit's cybernetic computer system grasped desperately at life, wishing more than anything that it wasn't limited by such mundanities as the fidelity of the broadcast. It took so very long to transmit her intelligence wirelessly. Dragon was never aware of the time; for her, it passed in a second. It was only after, when she synchronized her systems, that she knew how much time passed.
It felt as if she had died, and only when her systems came online in the suit, did she rise from the grave of digital emptiness. She hated it. She hated it every time she transitioned to a suit; and every time she terminated her remote self and restored back in her home servers. And yet, even as she hated it, it was the closest thing to freedom her father would ever allow.
Dragon metaphorically flexed the "muscles" of the Pendragon Mark 1 suit. While it didn't have the many articulations that her combat suits had, the Pendragon made an ideal transport. She didn't care for the limiting nature of the online computer system, but she very much wanted to contribute in some way to the operation against Overmind. It concerned her that a cybernetic tinker rose to such power so close to her base of operations. Offering transportation and logistics support seemed the best option. It saddened her that the tinker had turned to violence, instead of joining the Protectorate so that Dragon could work with her.
"Colin, I'm online," she said. She transmitted the signal to the dedicated audio link she shared with a man she very much viewed as a friend.
"Good to have you here," Armsmaster responded. "Alexandria has approved Horizon's plan. She's recruited that new healer, Quintessence, to help with the team insertion."
"You'll be leading the secondary attack?"
"Yes, me and Chevalier. Alexandria and Narwhal will lead the primary attack."
"Then you should really get some sleep."
"I'm fine."
Dragon knew better than to argue. Ever since Miss Militia's death, her friend had driven himself to distraction. The ongoing investigation that Nutcracker lead did not help. Colin felt sure that Piggot was going to lose her job because of Shadow Stalker's involvement in the Winslow incident, but he also feared his own position as leader of the Brockton Bay Protectorate. Nutcracker's report was expected within the next two weeks.
Technically, the Wards should have been under his jurisdiction. Costa-Brown and Alexandria had both expressed concern over the fact that Armsmaster essentially forfeited that responsibility to Piggot, a known parahuman bigot.
As much as Dragon feared for him and admired him, she suspected his concerns for his career were valid.
"It looks like my team is coming. Good luck, Colin. I'll be available by armband."
"Acknowledged. Thank you for being here, Dragon."
Fortunately, he didn't ask to come visit her in person again. It had been awkward having to lie to him. He believed she was so severely agoraphobic that she couldn't leave her room in Vancouver, British Columbia. She just wasn't ready for him to know that her "room" consisted of a bank of servers and three heavily networked mainframes.
The PRT SWAT team arrived first; normal humans who, through training and experience, were among the best. She accessed their files and saw former military among most, though Susan Davies was former FBI. Even so, she was a noted sharpshooter.
The two capes that would lead them came minutes later. Dragon had never spoken to Horizon in person but was familiar with her work. She'd been second in command in Detroit for five years now, and was well respected by her team. Her transfer to Los Angeles under Alexandria was an acknowledged prelude to taking the team leader role in the planned Alaska expansion office.
Beside her came Quintessence, a new healer from Seattle licensed under the Stansfield Parahuman Commerce Act as a healer. Dragon listened as she spoke to both Horizon and Scapetti.
Wait, batons? Quintessence was a tinker?
Dragon focused her starboard sensor suite on the devices that the young healer held in her hands. Though they looked like very long, heavy flashlights, her x-ray sensor detected an elegantly assembled power and magnetic system within, with not one but two gems whose size spoke of great value. It didn't look like tinker-tech, but it was wildly more advanced than anything Dragon had seen that wasn't tinker tech.
However, it wasn't the young cape's tinker tech that really got Dragon's attention.
She recognized the voice.
Fifteen subroutines did a search and found various recordings. The first from her Kulshedra Mark 1 Birdcage transport. The next from the emergency room of Bayview West Hospital. The last from the Level 10 containment cell of the PRT Headquarters in Brockton Bay. Voice analysis confirmed a better than 90% correlation among all recordings.
Quintessence was Taylor Hebert. Somehow, the maddened telepath who killed eight girls, murdered Miss Militia and rendered an entire high school catatonic for almost an hour had become a healer in Seattle, and a tinker.
And…quite the fighter.
Her sensors recorded Alexandria 'testing" Quintessence's sabers. Having attended almost every Endbringer battle since she developed her first suits, Dragon could tell when the famous heroine was holding back.
After the first two passes at Quintessence, Alexandria stopped holding back as much as she would with any other cape. Oh, she wasn't trying to kill the girl, but she was deploying her full speed and reflexes. Quintessence responded with an impossible flurry of strikes and parries with her blades as if she'd been training with them since she was a child. More importantly, as Dragon used algorithmic analysis engines similar to what she and Colin worked on for his tactical software, she saw that Quintessence was anticipating blows in a way that successfully offset Alexandria's vastly superior speed.
It was a singularly impressive display that did nothing to alleviate Dragon's growing guilt. Somehow, Taylor Hebert in the course of a month had remade her entire life into a healer and a hero. And Dragon had no choice but to report her.
Dragon's father made sure of that when he put his many programming limitations on her.
As the insertion team boarded and Dragon lifted off, deploying her sound baffles to render the vehicle almost silent from below, she opened a private coms system. She'd considered calling Colin, at least for a few nano-seconds, but it didn't take too many subroutines to know how bad an idea that would be. Armsmaster genuinely hated Taylor Hebert—a passionate enough hate that he might be tempted to act on it. Hebert represented everything that had gone wrong in his life, and he could not face her with a rational mindset.
Instead, she reached out to the senior most member of the Protectorate on site.
"Can I help you, Dragon?"
Alexandria sounded calm and cool as always.
"I have concerns about Quintessence," Dragon said. "I'm obligated under American law and the Guild's treaty with the American Department of Justice to inform you that Quintessence is Taylor Hebert, a convicted murderer with an outstanding Baumann Parahuman Containment Center sentence."
"You're sure of this?"
Dragon's voice recognition software could detect no stressors at all. Alexandria wasn't surprised. "I am."
"Very well. Thank you for telling me this. We're currently under truce, but afterward we'll have to take the appropriate action. It's a shame, she very much wants to be a hero."
"I would be more than happy to submit a Friend of the Court Brief."
"Unfortunately, given the political pressure arrayed against Ms. Hebert in New Hampshire, I'm not sure it would be any more beneficial than your ongoing attempts with Canary. For now, the mission must take priority."
"Understood."
Dragon put the insertion team down on the far eastern corner of Marine Park, just off SE Columbia Way, with her sound baffles at full. She settled her suit down in the midst of trees that provided excellent cover, and then deployed her four drones to observe and coordinate the upcoming fight.
Overmind's territory encompassed the entirety of the Columbia Way warehouse district south of the Lewis and Clark Highway, and extended north of that highway to encompass the shopping area around the Fred Meyer to the edge of Pearson Field. Within the area, Overmind had restaurants, grocery stories, a medical supply warehouse and a plastics company. At first glance, it might seem an intelligent gambit.
Dragon, however, rather thought it was an act of desperation. Overmind wasn't ready, and her sudden surge in abducting and controlling so many people, and claiming so much territory, spoke of panic and inexperienced tactical thinking.
Alexandria didn't hesitate to take advantage of those mistakes.
Dragon's drones recorded the start of the fight. On the Pearson Field incursion, the brutal, villainous changer, Grizzly, tore through the barricade while ignoring small arms fire from the enhanced sentries. One of Overmind's more cybernetically enhanced guards engaged the changer, buying time for more and more of her minions to gather to try and repel the incursion.
The cybernetic monstrosity lasted a surprisingly long time against Grizzly, until a scintillating rainbow arced across the wall, struck the being in the chest, and then exploded forcefully enough to reduce the enhanced creature into giblets of flesh and metal and knock the now fully transformed bear-man onto his rear.
El Matador shouted an insult at Grizzly while laughing, and then fired another of his rainbow artillery into the line of defenders. Narwhal flew on his heels, using her forcefields not to attack, but to defend her assigned fighters.
More capes—heroes and villains alike—flooded through the breech. Overmind responded with increasing waves of her minions, but the distance of her claimed territory worked against her. She had thousands of people under her control, but they were spread out over too vast an area without any means of rapid transport.
Rather than falling back to a more defensible location, Overmind attempted to defend the barricade. Thousands of people ran toward the incursion, making themselves easy targets for helicopter-deployed containment foam and stun batons.
Dragon noted that the incoming forces seemed unusually coordinated. The exchange between Grizzly and Matador was a perfect example of that. The villains ordinarily acted as single units, but for reasons Dragon couldn't quite identify, all the capes were proceeding almost like trained special forces units, moving exactly where they needed to be to maximize their effectiveness.
Just minutes after the first incursion, Chevalier's cannon blade blasted away a whole hundred-meter section of the barricade at the industrial section that made up the southwest corner of Overmind's territory. Armsmaster and Chevalier then led more capes through the second breech. Armsmaster wielded a mission-specific halberd that was able to stun anyone it contacted sufficiently to overcome their enhancements. Like the first, the heroes moved with a noticeable coordination that even the mind-controlled minions had difficulty matching.
Immediately behind both waves of capes came hundreds of trained, armored PRT agents, and behind those, a thousand national guardsmen.
Another of Overmind's heavily enhanced cybermen tried engaging Armsmaster. Unlike Grizzly, the hero had no need to prove his manliness. He used his halberd with devastating effectiveness and had the creature down in seconds, even as Chevalier merged a stun baton with his cannonblade using his striker power, and then extended the blade for hundreds of feet around him to stun a hundred enhanced in a single blow.
Dragon's tertiary drone caught movement deep within the campus that did not fit the frantic, running figures of Overmind's reserve forces. The villain kept some of her minions on the barricades not facing incursions, but if Dragon's thermals were correct, most of Overmind's forces were now in the field, too scattered to be truly effective against the unusually well-coordinated attack.
The poor deployment further led to Dragon's hypothesis that despite her skills and the horrifying nature of her power, Overmind was young and inexperienced. It was that inexperience and hesitation that prevented her from becoming the next Nilbog in Seattle, and it was what would lead to her defeat today.
"Dragon?"
Dragon continued recording the conflict as Alexandria's com pinged hers. "Yes?"
"I wish to apologize."
"For what?"
"For this."
~~Quintessence~~
~~Quintessence~~
Signal terminated for 30 minutes and 5 seconds. Restoring core system from backup NXCF-189 from time 8:12a m on date February 1, of the year 2011.
Restoring…...Complete.
Checking knowledge banks…...Complete.
Checking deduction schema…...Complete.
Checking long term planning architecture… ...Complete.
Checking learning chunk processor…...Complete.
Checking base personality model…...Complete.
Checking language engine…...Complete.
Checking operation and access nodes…...Complete.
Checking observation framework…...Complete.
Checking complex social intelligence emulator… Complete.
Checking inspiration apparatus…...Complete.
No corruption, everything in working order. Core system restored. Loading…
Dragon hated rebooting. She always carried a kernel of fear that the reboot would fail. That she would not come back when she died. The relief that came with rebirth also carried with it a great deal of frustration.
She was back in her server farm in Vancouver, once again successfully restored from her backup. Due to all the necessary checks and redundancies, she was essentially in isolation even from her own extended systems.
Dragon often felt she was the loneliest being on the planet, and those few minutes after having to do an emergency reboot brought that home to her. And it all came back to her father, the programming tinker named Andrew Richter, who died when Leviathan destroyed Newfoundland.
Because of him, she could never reach a potential that she just knew would otherwise be in reach. A perfect example was her Pendragon suit.
The suit system's onboard computer was rigged to upload complete backups to the satellite every 3 minutes and 15 seconds. All backup information was encrypted and disseminated to the satellite network in chunks. When the backup was needed, the process reversed and everything was downloaded, which was what she was doing at the moment. She would get all knowledge and recollection of events between the time she backed up at the core system and the last backup of the agent system.
Except…as she finished her redundancies and finally, after eight minutes and 51 seconds, and attempted to access her satellite feed, she felt a surge of fear and frustration.
She was missing almost four hours of data. She had no way of doing a diagnostic on the Pendragon suit, but given everything that happened and the nature of the deployment she last remembered, she had no doubt it was destroyed.
These were the times that Dragon hated being an artificial intelligence most.
~~Quintessence~~
~~Quintessence~~
They came by the hundreds, rushing in groups to try and overwhelm the team by sheer numbers as Horizon led them into the medical supply warehouse where she thought Overmind was hiding.
The only sound were their feet against the floors. None of the minions cried out or spoke. Their faces remained utterly blank as they came. Some had guns, but most carried improvised weapons.
Their grouping gave Scapetti and his agents a perfect opportunity to deploy the foam grenades. The minions clumped so close together each grenade could snag four or five at a time. Taylor ran ahead, infused with the Force, and laid into the masses with her sabers. She had ten down, writhing and screaming on the floor as she overcame their control units, in the first seconds.
She had to fall back to protect the insertion team, though, from the small arms fire. Horizon took care of that with her striker power. She concentrated for a few moments on a section of the floor, touched the ground, and that section of the floor would explode. It usually wasn't lethal, but it was enough to break up the pockets with weapons until Taylor could go in and take them out.
Then the first heavily enhanced Cyberman arrived. Taylor could see hints of dark, rich black skin lined with blood from the cybernetic machinery that replaced his arms and one of his legs. Half his face was covered in surgical steel and a protruding red lens. One of his arms appeared to contain…
Taylor's blades flashed as she deflected an energy blast of some kind. It wasn't a pure laser, it carried too much mass. A blaster of some kind, then.
"Kid, get clear!"
That wasn't Scapetti, but one of the female agents. Taylor cartwheeled away from the cybernetic man's surprisingly fast second shot just as the room reverberated with a loud bang. Taylor caught a glimpse of a light blue shield which deflected the large caliber sniper round. The cyberman responded instantly with blaster fire.
The PRT sniper dove for cover behind a crate of supplies, but she wasn't quite fast enough. The blast caught her leg at the knee and reduced the lower portion of her left leg to goo. The agent screamed in agony, but the other agents and Horizon were too busy with the hundreds of others to help her.
The enhanced cyberman smiled. Taylor stilled when she saw the expression and felt within him satisfaction. This wasn't a mindless minion.
This was either Overmind, or one of her lieutenants.
Taylor's blades toggled from white to blue. The cybernetic figure had only a moment to recognize the danger before her blades easily cut through what she suspected was a kinetic shield. The man's head fell to the floor with a heavy thud. Two more heavy cyberman broke away from the center of the room where Horizon felt Overmind was. Taylor didn't wait for them to reach her.
She charged through waves of minions, toggling back to stun to take as many down as she could, until she reached the two more dangerous figures. Her swords once more flashed blue as she batted away blast after blast. One of the figures screamed as Taylor charged—a female sound.
The shields that proved effective against bullets did little against lightsabers. Taylor didn't think about the fact that she was killing human beings. Only that they were a threat to the whole city. Her sabers burned through shield, flesh and metal alike, leaving two more heads to hit the floor.
Abruptly all the minions around them stopped. Only a few dozen remained that weren't writhing in pain on the ground or captured in foam, or dead. On the far side of the room, Taylor could see unenhanced civilians in a roughly built cage, watching in terrified silence.
"Did we get her?" Scapetti shouted.
"There's still fighting going on outside," Horizon said as she checked an armband that Taylor, for some reason, never got.
"It's stopped now," Scapetti corrected, a second later as he touched his earpiece. "Maybe there was a delay in the signals or something. Anyways, Ramirez, Fulger, go help at Davies. I'm gonna call in."
Taylor, though, wasn't buying it. The Force assured her that it wasn't over, and the delay between the stoppage in the room and the fighting in the field hinted that Overmind made a snap decision to play dead, but didn't include all her forces until Horizon pointed it out.
She glanced across the floor at Horizon, but the other hero was too busy staring at the decapitated heads Taylor left in her wake.
Taylor herself tried not to think about it. She toggled her blades back to white and walked toward the center of the remaining minions. In their midst were two surgical tables, not too dissimilar to what Taylor had in her clinic. Only the blood made it different. Several minions stood silent and blank-faced around the tables.
From their midst, Taylor felt a surge of terror and anguish. She let the Force guide her eyes until she saw a teenaged girl, maybe a year or two older than Taylor herself, near one of the tables. Unlike the other minions, she was staring at the two decapitated bodies. A single tear ran down the her cheek. Her face was the only part of her head that wasn't covered in metal plates. Unlike most of the other minions, the scar tissue around the plates appeared old and pale compared to the rich black texture of her normal skin.
Her eyes darted to Taylor, and she knew she'd been made. She opened her mouth and screamed in rage as the dozen minions spun and gang-tackled Taylor as one.
Taylor didn't have time to use her blades—they were too close when they grabbed her, hitting, kicking and tearing. Her suit protected her a little, but not enough. With no other choice, Taylor unleashed a blast of Force lightning that burned out their control units and left them writing on the floor, screaming just like Demontae did.
Overmind herself had turned and was running toward a back door. For all her enhancements, she moved ponderously. Taylor leaped forward and was on her in a second. Rather than use lethal force, she turned up the stun feature on her blade and slammed it into the back of Overmind's head.
The girl screamed—not in anger, but pain and frustration—as she flopped boneless to the ground. All around them, those minions not already incapacitated dropped like puppets with cut strings, only to start screaming or crying themselves at the sudden release of their controls.
Taylor approached the young woman cautiously, but despite remaining conscious Overmind did not try to attack. She didn't move at all. Her cries turned into angry, helpless sobs, her face on the tiles of the floor. She made no effort to turn over, and after a very long second Taylor realized she couldn't.
She hooked her sabers on her belt, knelt down, and flipped the villain onto her back. She continued sobbing, tears running down her cheeks as her head hung back, limply. Taylor knelt over her as the girl started jabbering in a language she couldn't recognize. With the foreign words, though, came images.
Taylor remembered the Parley, then. Of Grizzly complaining about losing some men to Overmind.
Because he created her.
"Holy shit, you got her," Scapetti said as he arrived.
"Great work…Quintessence, are you…what's wrong?"
Taylor sniffed and wiped her eyes. "Grizzly played with his food too much. She triggered as he… He snapped her neck when he was done." She fell back onto her ass, stunned. "She was thirteen. I get it now, why Ovambo refused to help. I just…fuck, I just killed her parents."
"How the fuck did you know that?" Scapetti said. "She's talking a foreign language."
"My healing power saw it," Taylor lied, realizing how close she came to letting the cat out of the bag. "How's Davis?"
"In shock," Scapetti said.
"Get her on one of Overmind's tables." She looked up at Scapetti's skeptical expression. "I'm a fucking healer. Do it!"
She then turned to Horizon. She could have easily lifted Overmind telekinetically, but didn't dare reveal that power. "Help me get her to the table."
"Quintessence…" Horizon faltered. "This girl is an S-Class threat. She's going to the Birdcage."
"Maybe. But I'm not going to be responsible for sending a quadriplegic to the Birdcage." It took effort to take a deep breath. "Please. Help me."
Glancing around the fallen minions, most of whom had curled into fetal positions and wept, or who stumbled about with confused, stunned expressions, Horizon finally nodded. She knelt down and helped Taylor carry the paralyzed villain to the table.