Chapter Twenty-Seven: Doing Right
March 19, 2011, 2:31 AM
Colin saw the Wards to their base, watched as Clockblocker organized his team, and then turned to go to Piggot's office. Mentally, he reviewed the events of the evening, particularly the Ward's response to the death of Ash.
The immediate, coordinated action from Gallant and Clockblocker was a credit to their crisis reaction conditioning, and spoke of prior coordination to establish a code word. Intrepid and Beetle had also stepped up admirably to manage the immediate potential for danger.
Personally, he agreed with Intrepid's assertion that there was no danger of Contract releasing Behemoth. He doubted anything less than a specific, targeted Simurgh plot would suffice to overcome Contract's iron will, and the fact that the Endbringer was still headed for Canberra indicated that this probably wasn't her work.
But that personal confidence didn't change the fact that the stakes were incredibly high, if they were wrong. In light of that, he approved of Clockblocker's immediate action which had allowed them a moment to react to the situation, though Contract wouldn't be happy when and if she realized what he'd done.
He reached Piggot's door and shut down the train of thought dedicated to his internal analysis of the Wards' dynamic, taking a moment to prioritize his report to her. Then he rapped sharply on the door and stepped through as soon as he heard her gruff, "Enter!"
She didn't seem surprised to see him, but Armsmaster found that he sometimes had difficulty reading the director. Before she could ask questions, he said, "Please engage all security protocols."
Piggot looked a little skeptical at that, but went through the sequence to engage anyway. "What's so important?"
"There has been an incident that you need to be made aware of immediately. Contract just watched a member of her family be shot. They were talking on a video call, when a man entered the room and shot Ash. Contract reacted with anger, mostly, and between the combined efforts of Intrepid and Beetle she has now cried herself out and is currently sleeping in her bunk. The Wards are taking shifts to sit with her in case she wakes up."
"When was this?" Piggot barked out.
"The shot was fired fifty-three minutes ago. I came directly from the Wards base to report to you."
"Why wasn't I informed fifty-three minutes ago? What if she had released Behemoth?"
"I did not feel that was likely. I also felt this information should be kept under all available protections, which required that you be informed personally. I don't believe she will release Behemoth, but I don't think it wise to risk common knowledge of her vulnerability, either."
Piggot pursed her lips, but didn't argue the point further. Instead, she backtracked and grilled Armsmaster for a full report, from the moment he'd left her office hours earlier to the time when he knocked on her door.
He didn't show her the video call, though he had recorded it. He also didn't tell her that he'd continued watching the feed after he cut the connection to the conference room. He wanted a chance to investigate Ash's death, and his life, without oversight. They'd been given a slew of new information about Contract's past, and he felt it was important to keep it out of the wrong hands. Though he trusted Piggot, he knew that a secret told could never be retrieved, and he didn't know each member of the PRT enough to trust them with information of this importance.
So after relating the details that she could have gotten from any of the Wards if she chose to double check his report, Armsmaster left her office and called Miss Militia.
His second-in-command (and soon to be co-leader) assured him that all was quiet in Brockton Bay. Armsmaster told her that Triumph and Aegis were also at her disposal, and informed her that he'd put the Wards on leave from active service. She didn't ask why, astute enough to understand that if he didn't volunteer the information, she wasn't to know it. That kind of insight was why he valued her as a teammate, and why he needed her as a co-leader.
Next he retreated to his workshop, where he implemented his own protocols to protect his work. He took the time to set up a ghost drive in his computer, then used it to back-trace the line which Ash had used for his video call. It wasn't difficult work - in addition to Ash's own coding, which seemed rushed, there were traces of Dragon's work everywhere as she tracked him from the moment he'd first messaged her.
Armsmaster tried to back-trace the hack into Alexandria's inbox, but hit a bizarre dead end. Only after poking around for close to an hour did he realize the truth: the other end of the connection was missing - not disconnected, but destroyed.
He cued up the video recording, and fast-forwarded to the moment he'd killed the link to the room's VC system.
He watched as Ash's blood sprayed everywhere, a single drop even landing on the laptop camera and turning half the display red. In the reduced visibility, he watched again as the killer turned, gun coming up even higher. Before he'd completed the action, there was a second gunshot that sounded quite different than the shotgun. A handgun, he'd guess, large caliber based on the way the back of the killer's head disintegrated.
The killer's body - Lucius Westfall's body, if Contract's rant was to be trusted - slumped out of sight, probably to the bar floor, and Armsmaster had a moment's view of the background without anyone in view of the camera. It was definitely a bar. After that moment, there was a second gunshot from the same handgun, and the camera rattled. At the time, he'd assumed there was a partner somewhere off camera he couldn't see. A third shot from the handgun cut the video feed, but not the audio or the signal itself. It took a fourth shot to do that.
Someone had shot Ash's killer, then shot the laptop 3 times in lightning-fast succession, without pause or hesitation. The only other person that he knew for sure to be in the room was the woman talking in the background. Had Ash mentioned her name? He watched the video again and, yes, Ash had said "Ellis is on the phone now," so presumably the woman was Ellis.
He'd learned all there was to learn from the video and hack itself. Now to turn to outside resources.
A search for Lucius Westfall turned up a number of weapons permits in Mississippi, Lousianna, and Georgia, a license for a truck from Florida, a dropout from business administration at University of Pennsylvania twenty years prior, and no living relatives. Interestingly, there was also no permanent work address. The address listed on his weapons permit was registered as a boarding house in Illinois.
All in all, the picture painted by his legal footprint did not point to a man who would walk into a bar and shoot a man. There was no history of mental illness, no indication of prior violence.
Searching for Ellis without a last name or age was useless, turning up thousands of listings in the US. Ash was a less common name, especially accounting for an age range somewhere between twenty-five and forty-five, but it was still too many, particularly when the search was expanded to include surnames. There was nothing to distinguish the MIT graduate from the homeless Afghan veteran. Even cross-checking for a handgun permit didn't help: no "Ash"s legally owned a handgun and far too many "Ellis"s did.
Just as Armsmaster was knuckling down to start trying to find other traces of Ash in the PRT system, Dragon called him.
"Hello?"
"Colin? I've got a few minutes break in crisis coordination. How is Fi doing?"
"Did you see the video conference recording?"
"I just watched it. How is she?"
"Sleeping, for now." Colin rubbed his temples, realizing now that he'd stopped working that he had a headache. It had probably been building for a while. "The Wards are keeping watch."
"What can I do?"
"I'm trying to find answers about what happened, as well as any details about who Ash is. It's one thing to give her privacy, but the more I know, the better I can help."
Dragon nodded. "I would have told you about the whole situation sooner, if I thought it would help. I'll forward you the records of our messages when I get the time to compile them. They're both so cagey that even after a month I don't know much."
"What do you know?"
"He's a good programmer. I got the impression they were pretty close."
Armsmaster ground his teeth. He had gathered that much for himself, thanks, but he tried to reign in his temper and not take his frustrations out on Dragon. "Where was he hacking from, physically?"
"The line always traced to a bunch of empty cotton fields in Texas. At first I assumed it was a safety measure, to bounce the signal through a terminal there, but now I'm not sure."
She sent the coordinates and he pulled the site up on satellite images. It did indeed appear to be the middle of nowhere. Armsmaster zoomed out, to get a better sense of which part of Texas they were talking about, and realized as he did so that the coordinates were sitting in the center of ten squares miles of fields that were out of season with the rest of the imagery. The resolution was off too.
The timestamp matched the surrounding data, but when he dug deeper into the data embedded in the picture, he found that the satellite images were close to fifteen years old.
Dragon, likely following his monitor or his keystrokes or both, gasped as he went to the satellite source and pulled up the most recent images manually.
Sitting in the center of the anomalous square was a large dirt plot, a parking lot, surrounding an old building that was most likely a bar.
County records showed no building permit, no taxes filed, nothing of any kind to indicate the existence of a structure in the area. The cotton fields were owned by a Robert Harding, who had been dead approximately fifteen years, but suspiciously the fields had never been claimed by anyone. And yet someone had to be planting and harvesting the farm, keeping up the appearance of his continued existence, even paying taxes on the farm income. And whoever it was, they were hiding an illegal bar on their property, where Ash had been killed just hours before.
Interestingly, Robert Harding had been married to an Ellis Greyson. They had one daughter: Johanna Harding who was now twenty eight years old. Other than his marriage and death certificates, there was very little on Robert Harding after a hunting accident that landed in him in the hospital when he was thirty-seven. Ellis' trail ended when she was nineteen, with the exception of her marriage license and her daughter's birth certificate. It was as though Ellis had dropped out of mainstream society at nineteen. She'd never even owned a credit card. There were no school or health records for Johanna, other than a birth certificate and a GED when she was fifteen.
If Ellis was the one operating the bar, which seemed likely, she was either using a gun off the black market, or perhaps one of the several weapons which Robert Harding had bought just after his accident. She had no handguns registered in her own name.
There was no Ash associated with any of the Hardings.
"You should see this." Dragon matched words to actions and sent him a link to a current satellite feed. Strictly speaking, accessing that satellite was illegal, but with the Simurgh on the move no one would look twice at the Protectorate accessing satellite data, even satellites pointed at Texas.
It took a little while to understand what he was seeing. He mistook the smoke for a storm cloud, and then even after he realized that he was actually seeing a fire, he didn't grasp the full significance right away.
The bar was burning.
From the look of things, it had been burning for a while. The roof had partially caved in, no longer supported by the interior, so the fire may have started in the main room. Was this evidence of more violence? Had it been set purposefully, to hide the evidence of the two deaths he already knew had happened here?
There were no cars in the dirt lot, but it did seem that the lot was big enough to contain the sparks. So far, the fields hadn't been affected. It looked like the fields might have been watered recently, perhaps as a precaution, but Armsmaster couldn't be sure.
"What do we do?" Dragon asked, though she didn't restore their visual link. Armsmaster didn't initiate visual either: audio would do for now, and he wanted the monitor space.
"Can we call the Texas Protectorate?"
"They're all responding to the Simurgh call to arms."
Of course. Armsmaster should have remembered that. The Texas team was the most mobile team in the country. It allowed them to be spread out, which was how they covered such an enormous area and why the PRT had been reluctant to allow Contract to be based there.
Armsmaster turned the options over in his head, but there weren't many choices. He could either make this an official investigation, or not. He didn't particularly want Fi's background investigated by strangers, however, and he knew she wouldn't want that either. She might even view it as a breach of trust, considering how closely she had held her secrets until now. Getting her to talk in front of Glenn and Legend - was that less than six hours ago? - had been like pulling camel teeth.
"We wait," Armsmaster finally answered. "After we deal with the Simurgh, I will go to Texas, or you can take a suit there, or I'll call up Ranger and talk to him personally. We worked together in Texas before I was transferred here, and he'd do me a favor if I asked. But any evidence is likely gone already. It will take me too long to get there now, the fire will be finished, and I can't say with certainty that this is important enough to call Ranger or anyone else away from the Simurgh preparations. For now, we wait."
"Speaking of, the predictions are stabilizing right around 5:45 AM," Dragon stated, implicitly asking for his help.
Armsmaster checked the time in the corner of his monitor as he pulled up the predictive algorithm. 4:33 AM. No pressure.
When the Simurgh actually arrived over Canberra, Armsmaster breathed a sigh of guilty relief. There was nothing more for him to do.
Instead, he could and would leave the management of the conflict in Dragon's capable hands while he returned his attention to the small doubt that had been growing in his subconscious all evening.
Where were Contract's rewards for killing Behemoth?
Her file from the New York City Protectorate was unwieldy. It seemed to consist of a transcript or after-action report from nearly every interaction she'd had over the course of the fifteen days she'd been there, in addition to copious notes from Company, Alexandria, and other thinkers. When Contract had transferred to Brockton Bay, Armsmaster had read Legend's summary, as well as the summaries written by the Wards, but hadn't bothered to slug through the entire file. That was about to change.
It took twenty minutes to find the information he wanted. Part of the delay was caused by being continuously, and morbidly, distracted by the content of the documents he was trying to skim through. The other cause was the simple disarray of the file. The documents weren't well named, the linking was inconsistent, and it seemed they'd abandoned a tagging system all together somewhere around the seventh or eighth day.
Despite this, he did finally uncover the information he wanted. Legend, acting in his capacity as her temporary guardian, had ordered the rewards be put into her Ward's trust, waiting to be released along with the normal $50,000 bonus. There was no record or indication that he'd discussed the decision with her, or even informed her of it. Searching the correspondence time-stamped the day before this action did turn up a motive: Company had warned Legend that the pressure of needing to manage so much money was one stress that Contract didn't need.
Perhaps a valid point, but not one to be considered in isolation. Armsmaster knew, from his conversations with her, that the general lack of gratitude from the Protectorate and PRT had weighed on her. The world had celebrated, and the internet had exploded with thanks, but she'd been kept largely apart from these revelries for her own safety. It wasn't that either choice was unforgivable, but more that there was no sign that they had been discussed with Contract.
If she had been kept inside the PRT headquarters most of the first day, being questioned about her powers, did she know that the entirety of New York City had woken up with a hangover on her account?
Did she even know that she had a trust?
Mentally, Armsmaster revised that. She knew about the trust, surely. He couldn't see Contract of all people signing the Ward's employment contract without reading every detail. But did she know that the bounties had been put into it?
There was a more sinister possibility, which he tried to ignore. Had the New York Protectorate and PRT chosen to isolate Contract from the revelry and bounties as a way of isolating her in general, to try to control her? It was an unsettling possibility, and not a conclusion he would reach lightly.
After all, Contract had voluntarily removed herself from the foster and school programs in Brockton Bay, essentially cutting herself off from all civilian contact. Nowhere in any of her transcripts did she inquire about the bounties, protest her confinement, or even show an interest in touring New York. In fact, she spent a large amount of time silent, ignoring whoever happened to be talking to her.
That sort of passive aggressiveness he could easily reconcile with the Contract he knew.
Far sooner than expected, Dragon rang him up again, exuberant about the victory over the Simurgh, on the excuse that she wanted his help putting together some sort of statistical model for why Canberra ought to be quarantined. They'd barely begun when Dragon's animated façade suddenly twitched, and then she dropped the call abruptly.
Thirty seconds later, Dragon sent him a message:
D: Triumvirate coming to BB. Looking for Fi. Action?
Immediately, he understood the situation and cursed himself for not predicting it earlier. The Simurgh had attacked ahead of schedule, presumably as a result of whatever Contract had done to Behemoth. Armsmaster knew that Contract had been surprised by the news, and until the moment she was informed otherwise had actually considered it impossible. She and Ash had even seemed to be trying to prevent the attack, assuming that Armsmaster had understood their conversation.
The Triumvirate, having not seen the video call, knew none of this. The obvious first course of action, after dealing with the Simurgh, was to question Contract. Both to establish what, if anything, she knew about the schedule change as well as to explore possible solutions.
Legend had raised the issue the previous evening before Glenn had interrupted them, trying to press Contract for details of what she had done. And that had been before the Simurgh added urgency to the situation.
Armsmaster considered what he knew, what the Triumvirate likely knew, and what he guessed of Contract's state of mind. He was the first to admit that he didn't fully understand most human beings, but it didn't take a great leap of intuition to read the hostility that Contract held for Legend and the Triumvirate.
A: Tell them that Contract lost family last night. Now is NOT the time to press her.
D: They're not listening. Details?
The speed of Dragon's answer told Armsmaster that she had already tried to deter them with an oblique summary. Given that Piggot knew the details, and that they would eventually be made a matter of record, there was no reason to deny the Triumvirate the specifics. None that they would find acceptable, at any rate.
A: Yes.
There was a few moments of delay. Not nearly enough time for them to have viewed the video, so Dragon had probably provided a verbal summary.
D: Didn't work.
Armsmaster ground his teeth and cursed, again, his poor social skills. He knew that he didn't make the best impression on the people around him - though he was never quite sure why - and he often wondered if he would be more listened to if he was better liked. Did his judgment count for nothing?
In his frustration, he ran a hand over his face and happened to catch sight of what he'd been doing before he'd been interrupted by Dragon.
A: They can't see Contract until I say so. Technically, I am her legal guardian. I will be waiting for them in conference room 703.
D: Good Luck.
Armsmaster immediately set out preparing the documentation he would need. First, the court order that Legend had pushed through the New York court system, declaring Contract to be a minor, a legal orphan, and a ward of the Protectorate; specifically, a ward of her regional leader. There had been some question about making her a ward of the regional PRT director instead, but the New York director hadn't wanted the hassle so it had fallen to Legend instead. Only it didn't name Legend specifically, just the title of her regional Protectorate leader.
Next, Armsmaster queued up the video recording and clipped everything he hadn't shown the Wards into a separate file. He garbled Ellis' voice in the background of the recording, and made a mental note to go back later and isolate what she was saying. It was a potential source of information he had overlooked earlier. He also remembered, at the last minute, to fuzz the Ward's civilian faces. As their adult superior, he was privy to their private files, but the Triumvirate were not.
He also prepared a record of the conversation with Ash that had convinced him to let Ash have contact with Contract. He didn't include his conversation with Dragon, or her messages with Ash. They could summarize that verbally.
He pulled up his beta of "he said, she said" and scanned through the file. He took the first fifty seconds and copied them into the start of an official report. He started with Ash's last words and ran through Contract's scream of "bastard". This meant that the file included the first gunshot, Contract screaming Ash's full name at the same time, Gallant cuing Clockblocker with the pre-arranged "Tag," code, Gallant's immediate assessment of her emotional reaction to losing a pseudo parent, namely hatred, and Intrepid's assessment that Contract wouldn't release Behemoth.
It was the most natural place to break off the transcript such that it didn't include Contract's rant which hinted at the Simurgh's involvement. Given her attack on Canberra, it didn't seem likely that Contract had been her actual target, and Armsmaster wasn't going to muddy the waters by telling the Triumvirate what Contract had said in the middle of grief, anger, and fear.
Armsmaster might not have realized he was her legal guardian before today, but now that he was aware of the responsibility, he was going to do his absolute best to live up to it.
Dragon alerted Armsmaster when the Triumvirate were eight minutes out from Brockton Bay. Armsmaster took that opportunity to send a prepared email to Piggot, Renick, Miss Militia, and Costa-Brown, informing them that the Triumvirate were inbound to Brockton Bay and he was reserving the secure conference room for briefing.
He also sent a separate warning to Miss Militia and Clockblocker, detailing exactly what sort of briefing the Triumvirate preferred. He left implicit the wish to delay that interview with Contract as long as possible.
Quick on the uptake as always, Miss Militia immediately assigned Battery, who was on monitor duty, to accompany her to the PRT headquarter to use the Wards' consul for monitoring, so that she could also serve as a physical guard for Contract without waking her. It prevented any of the Triumvirate from volunteering for the same position, cleverly blocking a potential access point.
Clockblocker didn't immediately reply, so Armsmaster forwarded the message to Kid Win, who was scheduled to be sitting with Contract in case she woke. The hero's answer was to wish him good luck.
It was not a sentiment Armsmaster received often, but he had to admit some satisfaction with having heard it twice now in quick succession. It made him feel like he was making the right judgment calls.
He made his way to the conference room and helped Dragon connect to one of the monitors near the head of the table, where he immediately sat down. Piggot came in a minute later, looking tired and harried. Renick looked a little fresher; he'd probably been allowed to sleep until the Simurgh actually arrived in Canberra and the official on-call alert had been issued.
The Triumvirate arrived before Miss Militia did, all three of them touching down under their own power. Armsmaster took half a moment to wonder why Eidolon hadn't teleported them over, but realized almost immediately that they'd probably used the flight to strategize. It's what he would have done.
Miss Militia arrived at the ground floor while Battery was still in route from the Protectorate base, but since Battery would likely be another five or six minutes out that couldn't be helped. Armsmaster used his access to the building's elevator system to deliver Miss Militia first, and then send the car up for the Triumvirate.
Some might think it was petty, perhaps, but Armsmaster's specialty was efficiency. He knew that every second could count, which was why he'd waited until the last possible moment to alert the rest of Brockton Bay to the Triumvirate's arrival. He intended to delay the meeting in every way he could.
When the Triumvirate made it to the conference room, Armsmaster insisted they wait to hear back from PRT Director Costa-Brown, who had not yet answered his email. There was an awkward silence that lasted nearly thirty seconds before Armsmaster received a reply. The director deferred her authority to Alexandria so that she could focus on the diplomatic situation with Canberra. It was the result Armsmaster expected - Costa-Brown often allowed Alexandria to be her voice and a counterpoint to Legend when she was unable to attend to something herself - but it took time, which was the general point.
Armsmaster also had a vague idea that Piggot hated it when Costa-Brown appointed a hero, rather than a deputy director, to speak for her. But that tension was too uncertain for him to be sure that it would pay out anything in this conversation.
After this was received, Armsmaster began the exhaustive process of employing every security protocol he had managed to uncover during his window of preparation. By PRT regulation, any cape or officer could request any security protocol at any time, until overruled by his superior's superior. In Armsmaster's case, that meant Costa-Brown, and while Alexandria appeared annoyed she wasn't confident enough in the situation to overrule him.
Nearly forty minutes later, the conversation actually began.
"Just what is so critical?" Alexandria snapped out in a demanding tone, unintentionally putting the conversation back into Armsmaster's hands. While he normally was succinct in his reports, he had received feedback on a few occasions that he possessed "the Tinker tendency to pay a great deal of attention to details of little importance."
Even though Armsmaster didn't agree with the feedback when it had been given to him, he intended to emulate it now. He began with Dragon's call about the algorithm, and walked the entire audience through his evening in exacting, excruciating detail, including technical programming details that he had frequently been advised to skip over in the past.
He insisted on listening to his recorded discussion with Ash three times, and played the prepared video five times through. He read the transcript of Gallant's diagnostic out loud, rather than allowing them to read it for themselves.
By the time he was finished, it had taken nearly an hour and half all told. Battery had been replaced by Velocity on the Protectorate consul, while Triumph took over "guard duty." Just after eight am, he got a message from Triumph that Contract had left the base with Intrepid and Clockblocker. Due to his insistence on security protocols, Armsmaster couldn't send a message out, so instead he dragged out his verbal summary of Contract's break down a little more than he had intended, walking a fine line between delaying the Triumvirate and giving them too much information.
Finally, he reported on Clockblocker's watch rotation assignment and his decision to post a Protectorate member in the Wards' base as a guard, implying the decisions had happened at the same time.
He didn't particularly want to discuss what he'd discovered about Ash after that, and thankfully Legend didn't give him the opportunity to do so.
"Are you suggesting that we not talk to Contract?" Legend demanded, leaning forward across the table.
Armsmaster counted to three in his head, remembering that every second counted, and promised to make the same pause every time he answered. He used the moment of delay to check the clock. 8:43 AM. The Wards had been gone for twenty-one minutes. How long would they be out?
"She is in a fragile mental state. Just because we have no indication that she will release Behemoth does not make it wise to push her."
"I'm not sure I agree with your assessment of her ability to hold him back," Alexandria said.
At the same time, Legend dryly pointed out, "We had no indication the Endbringers would accelerate, either. We need answers."
Dragon answered Alexandria while Armsmaster cursed the belligerence Contract had shown to Glenn and Legend last night. Would he be more sympathetic if she hadn't been antagonistic?
"I have spoken with Contract when she was, by her own admission, on the edge of giving up. None of the social cues she exhibited at that time were present at any point last night. She was upset, but not depressed. Most likely, Ash's death has strengthened her resolution to save lives, not weakened it."
"We can't know that without speaking with her," Alexandria insisted.
Armsmaster started his count, but Miss Militia spoke before he was finished, "Gallant is surely the best one to judge the emotional state of his teammate, having both prior exposure to her and the ability to read her emotional aura." His co-leader turned to address him specifically, "Did Gallant give any indication that he was concerned with a Behemoth return at any time last night?"
This time, Armsmaster did get to finish his delaying count. "No. Quite the opposite." Though Gallant hadn't denied the possibility, Intrepid vocally had and Gallant had not contradicted him.
Alexandria pursed her lips, but it was Eidolon that spoke next, "Even so, we have never seen the Endbringers accelerate for any reason other than the emergence of a new specimen. We need to speak with Contract about the possible causes."
Renick defended Contract immediately, even before Dragon or Miss Militia could speak, "We all saw the video. Contract wasn't expecting an attack any more than we were. In fact, she tried to prevent it, and she was confused that it was even possible. She also clearly stated that there's nothing more she can do."
"So she said in the heat of the moment," Piggot threw in. Armsmaster suppressed the instinct to frown at her, instead staying focused on the Triumvirate.
"And you think she'll be more level headed now, in the midst of her grief?" Dragon asked, sounding genuinely confused.
Piggot shook her head. "No. But it may be a line to pursue later, at a more appropriate time."
Alexandria wasn't going to give up that easily, but then Armsmaster hadn't expected her to. "We don't need your permission." She planted her hands on the arms of her chair, like she was going to stand up.
"You do need mine," Armsmaster interjected, choosing to forego his delay. Alexandria froze, and Armsmaster carefully didn't let his mouth twitch in the slightest.
"Excuse me?" Eidolon asked, confused.
"I am Contract's legal guardian." He said it as casually as possible, suddenly suspecting that Dragon hadn't told them about this gambit beforehand. Perhaps she'd just said that he wanted to brief the Triumvirate. In light of that possibility, Armsmaster tried to be as straightforward about the situation as he could manage.
He wasn't taking a huge risk by defying the Triumvirate. Of course not. He was just doing his duty in the usual, socially inept way that was expected of him. Armsmaster took as deep a breath as he could manage, to discreetly to calm his nerves, then continued. "And I don't think additional stress would do her any good at this time."
The table was stunned. No one had expected that play, except Dragon, and she had the advantage of being able to transmit any facial expression she wished, regardless of how she actually felt.
Legend recovered first. "I was named Contract's guardian."
Armsmaster turned towards him in fake confusion, "No. Her guardianship was given to her local Protectorate leader." He added a further note bafflement to his tone, and played the one card that might actually force Legend to acknowledge the transfer of authority. "You didn't authorized her removal from the Smiths to the Ward base. I did."
The Triumvirate didn't get to be where they were by being slow. Though Alexandria's thinker rating was only a four, and Eidolon's was of course impossible to pin down, Armsmaster had long been accustomed to mentally assigning a seven rating to each of them. Mostly, this was due to their long experience and significant sources of information. But the way they were looking at him now made him wonder if there wasn't a significant amount of actual power being directed against him at that moment.
His saving grace, what he was counting on, was that he hadn't actually lied yet, and he didn't intend to. It was yet another lesson he'd picked up from Contract, and one he intended to put to good use in her defense.
Miss Militia took up the line effortlessly, and Armsmaster was thankful, again, for all the long hours of patrol they'd done together from the time they were Wards. "If you were supposed to remain Contract's guardian, why was she transferred to Brockton Bay and out of your jurisdiction?"
Having read her file in more depth, Armsmaster was willing to guess that they'd transferred Contract in a transparent attempt to simply shake her up. They'd made next to no progress after more than two weeks of constant observation and careful interaction, so they'd decided to take a risk and see how she would respond to a new team.
It had worked, to an extent. Contract had opened up, yes. But that didn't mean that her new team was willing to roll over like a good dog. Armsmaster was well aware that he might be risking any chance of a future promotion, but he kept hearing something that Dragon had said a few days ago, echoing in his head.
"It's possible to be a hero, but do more harm than good, even accidentally. But with Sophia Hess, it wasn't accidental." They had been discussing Contract's attitude regarding Sophia Hess, the way she had easily seen what others had failed to notice, and Dragon had quoted to him what Contract herself had said during her debriefing. After a moment, Dragon had added, "Do you ever get the feeling that Contract had a lot of experience in being heroic, before she became an actual hero?"
The question had put into words what Armsmaster himself had been struggling to describe in his own thoughts, ever since she had walked into his lab with her cell phone out, and told him that she was an extremely accomplished wordsmith.
Contract was not a conventional hero, not by any means, but something about her conveyed that she sincerely wanted to be heroic and do what she believed was right. It wasn't something he'd given much thought to, after joining the Wards and calling himself a hero. He'd taken for granted that heroes fought villains, and it was his right and responsibility to participate in that fight. "Doing right," on a broader scale, had never occurred to him.
Legend was answering Miss Militia, ignorant of Armsmaster's temporary loss of concentration. "Company believed it would be best for her to be away from New York City and the reminders of the sacrifice she made there."
As much as Contract hated Company, Armsmaster had to give credit where credit was due. The thinker did offer suggestions that seemed to improve her life in the long-run, though he wouldn't want to be the one to say so to her face.
Alexandria redirected the conversation back on track before Armsmaster could figure out how to derail it further by going on a Company tangent. "What do you need to hear to convince you, Armsmaster? I can assure you, we have no interest in pushing Contract into a mental break. But now that the Endbringers have broken their schedule, we have no idea what to expect next. Contract may have information that could save lives."
Dragon answered for him, neatly redirecting the conversation away from Contract once again. "The predictive algorithm doesn't give any indication that another attack is coming, and it was able to predict the Simurgh even outside of our expectations."
Unlike previous tangents, this did kick off a significant discussion. When they came back around to the issue of Contract, Miss Militia raised the possibility of new Endbringers, and whether the algorithm would account for them. More debate ensued.
At nine o'clock, Piggot and Renick excused themselves to deal with administrative tasks which could not be put on hold any longer.
Alexandria used the interruption to pull the conversation back on track, and Armsmaster immediately raised the (all too real) possibility that pressing Contract for answers now might sour future relations with her. At 9:02 AM Clockbocker sent Armsmaster another status update, this one saying that they were back in the Ward's base. At 9:13 AM, the Ward told him that the Triumvirate were welcome to come down, as long as they were willing to meet with all the Wards. Evidently, Contract wanted the moral support of her friends.
It didn't come a moment too soon. As the five of them rode the lift down to the Wards' base, Armsmaster could nearly feel the heavy gazes of the Triumvirate resting on him. On the other hand, Dragon was projecting herself on the inside of his display, smiling smugly, and Miss Militia was standing a little closer than usual in what felt like silent support.
He took that as a sign he was doing something right.