Earning Her Stripes
Part Forty-Three: Negotiations
[A/N: This chapter commissioned by Fizzfaldt and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]
Director Emily Piggot, PRT ENE
Emily laced her fingers together, laying her hands flat on the desk in front of her. It seemed an inadequate gesture for the situation at hand, but it was the best she could do for the moment. She was used to rapidly-developing circumstances—cape powers were an ideal means, if the word could be used in such a fashion, for making things go from bad to worse in an exceedingly short time—but this one had spun out of control faster than even she could keep a handle on.
Fortunately, the presence of the Real Thing had reeled matters in again, almost as fast. Without them, even the awareness that Butcher and the Teeth were pursuing the Undersiders toward the PRT building wouldn't have done her a damn bit of good. Fighting the Teeth was almost impossible with the Butcher running rampant across the battlefield, and fighting the Butcher herself involved a whole sheaf of problems on top of that.
Yet they'd not only engaged her without loss, but they'd stopped her and the Teeth. The latter were in PRT custody, while the Butcher had been taken away by the Real Thing, then returned just moments ago. Now, in her office, she had the three members of the independent team explaining the current situation to her, while the rooftop guards kept an eye on Blockade's suit and Butcher herself.
Still, she sat and listened to them, for the very good reason that things could've turned out a whole lot worse. Armsmaster had been on site, and had made sure that nothing got out of hand; though from his report, there hadn't been a hell of a lot he could've done to stop them if they'd decided to overstep the rules. As it was, there'd been a couple of times he'd had to speak up when it seemed they were about to go too far.
On the upside of matters, the PRT had come out of the incident with a new, deniable asset. Fleeing the Butcher, the Undersiders had come straight to the PRT building; under cover of truce, certainly, but they had still come. In the aftermath, once the threat had been categorically shut down by the Real Thing, Emily had put a proposition to them: work for her behind the scenes, discouraging new gangs from settling in the city, and she would allow them certain concessions.
Immunity for prosecution from prior criminal activity was something she'd anticipated and already decided to agree to, while the other demands (though unusual) had been surprisingly law-abiding. The most onerous was Rachel Lindt demanding oversight of all stray dogs in the city, and the funding to care for them, while the most bizarre was Regent requesting a one-on-one game challenge with Armsmaster. (As far as she was concerned, Wallis would sit down with the boy even if she had to threaten to withhold his Tinker Budget to make him do it.) All told, it was doable, and cheap at the price.
It was also well outside standard PRT practice, but the ENE department may as well have been the Wild West as far as the rest of the PRT was concerned. As with Anchorage, the only real limit on her purview was how much fallout occurred in the aftermath of her efforts to keep the cape criminal element in their place (which, in her opinion, was at least five miles outside city limits). Thus, her 'softly, softly' approach to throttling criminal activity within the city had garnered exactly zero official attention.
The activities of the Real Thing had raised a few queries, but that was mainly because they'd been quite loud in their pursuit of the gangs. They were irritating, but at least (for the moment) they solved more problems than they caused. Of course, it would be nice if they could bring the 'problems caused' meter down to zero.
To date, in her experience with capes in general, that was a pipe dream, so she wasn't going to hold it against them.
"So, you're saying she's blindfolded and manacled." She wanted to make sure she had things right. "And this is somehow preventing her from using her powers to devastate everyone in the vicinity, blow up the building, then teleport away?"
"Correct." Even outside her (admittedly formidable) suit of power armour, Blockade radiated an air of unstoppable certitude. "You're aware that good steel doesn't allow for dimensional shenanigans. The manacles and blindfold are made of it. She can't see or project her offensive powers through it, teleport out of it, teleport with it, otherwise affect it with her powers, or reach past the hand-guards to touch anything that's not good steel."
That seemed remarkably comprehensive to Emily. She tilted her head. "And this is without involving actual technology that needs to be maintained? Just the standard properties of the metal itself?"
Blockade shrugged. "In the same way that you can rely on a tank's armour to protect you against rifle fire simply by having several inches of steel between you and the rifle."
Back in the day, Emily had been in almost that exact position more than once, so she simply nodded. Then she paused; this next part would be less palatable. "We can't keep her like that forever, you understand."
Firebird took up the conversational ball. "Oh, we get it. People have rights. There are legalities to be observed. Unfortunately, the people who came up with those rights had no concept of Butcher's level of pure bullshit offensive power. What's a basic human right for anyone else is an open invitation to destroy everything around her and escape, for her."
Monochrome nodded. "So, we have a dilemma. We obviously can't kill her, both for legal and practical reasons. Simply releasing her is equally off the table. Literally cutting off her arms and legs, and gouging out her eyes, would be a horrific human rights abuse, while at the same time being perhaps the most practical way of ensuring she can't attack people willy-nilly. Likewise, leaving her blindfolded and manacled without any kind of respite is also a human rights abuse, but technically reversible." She gave Emily a level stare, as if to challenge her to somehow cut the Gordian knot.
"Why only 'technically' reversible?" Emily looked from Monochrome to Blockade.
Blockade sighed. "Because until I can design a lock using only good steel that can both fit on a set of manacles and isn't vulnerable to being picked by a five-year-old with a hairpin, the only way to secure such things against Brutes is for Monochrome to snap them into place and remove them again. She's literally the only person on Earth with the strength to make good steel even flex, let alone bend or break it."
Emily needed no time at all to figure out the connotations of what the Tinker was saying. "So if we take Butcher off your hands, we wouldn't be able to remove her restraints even if we absolutely needed to."
"And we're not equipped to keep her as a prisoner except in the extreme short term." Firebird folded her arms to make her point. "The way I see it, we have exactly two options, neither of them easy or good."
"Let me guess." Emily had been around the block more than a few times, and she could spot oncoming bad news with the best of them. "First option: we try to fast-track a Birdcage sentence, which just kicks the can down the road to the point that in three months, we've got a bunch of dead capes and a terrifying new version of Butcher facing off against Glaistig Uaine. Whoever wins that particular head-to-head, it ends badly for everyone. Second option: I try to get permission to keep her permanently in restraints, which only needs one obstructive bleeding-heart back in Washington to scupper. Did you have a third option that I hadn't thought of?"
Blockade waggled her hand from side to side. "Maybe I can Tinker up some sort of teleport portal to another Earth, where humans never evolved. Wrap her up in restraints she can break out of, kick her through, close the door behind her. That's the only other option I can think of."
"And we're back to human rights abuses," Emily noted without heat. "You're right, of course. There is no good option available to us. The least bad option is that I take her off your hands, restrained as she is, and send a request up the line for permission to lock her down in some way that'll actually stick."
Firebird grimaced. "Easier said than done. My dad's in the legal profession, and he says laws are always about thirty years behind the times. Sure, they can adapt current ones—that's why wire fraud legislation involves the term 'carriage service'—but to get comprehensive new laws into play, covering new situations, takes decades. This is why it's still nigh impossible to prosecute internet scammers operating out of foreign countries if they're paying off their local authorities."
Emily exhaled, slow and measured. "Alright. We take her as is. I'll push for emergency authorization to keep her restrained. But if Washington refuses, we may have to let her go under standard protocols."
Blockade, arms crossed, scowled. "Then you'll have to deal with the fallout when she carves her way through half the city." Despite being the smallest person in the room, she spoke with complete confidence, as if the matter had already been decided in her favour.
Firebird's lips pressed into a thin line. "And if that happens, I assume the PRT will do what it does best—cover its ass?"
Emily met her gaze without flinching. "That's not my priority. My job is making sure we don't get to that point."
Monochrome, who had keeping quiet for the moment, spoke up. "Then you'd better get that authorization moving. Before someone in Washington decides they care more about optics than public safety."
Emily didn't need the reminder. She tapped the intercom. "Get me a secure line to Washington. I need to speak to the Chief Director. Now."
Blockade shifted her weight, clearly still displeased. "If they screw this up, we're fixing it our way next time."
Emily didn't respond to that. There was no point; she already knew the truth of it. As the line connected, she leaned back, running through her arguments in her head.
Nothing in this job was ever simple.
Tell me something I don't know.
A Few Minutes Later
PRT Department 1, Washington DC
Alexandria
Chief Director Rebecca Costa-Brown placed her phone on the desk and leaned back in her ergonomically perfect office chair. Closing her eyes, she let out an aggravated sigh. If it's not one thing, it's another.
She'd heard about this 'good steel' substance in Emily's reports before now, but there were many (many) Tinkers under her command, so it hadn't jumped out at her. Now, however, three different aspects of Emily's direct call had grabbed her attention and were looting its pockets for lunch money. First, good steel was apparently capable of both preventing teleportation (useful, but not world-ending) and blocking vision-based Thinker powers. Second, it was reportedly impervious even to powers that could bypass all other forms of protection. And third, none other than Butcher Fifteen (Fourteen having been killed and subsumed by that little shit March out of New York) had been captured and was being held incommunicado by way of simple restraints forged from this metal.
That wasn't the problematic aspect. She was intrigued by good steel, and indeed Emily had pledged to send the sample Armsmaster was currently studying down to DC, but right now she was facing a far bigger problem. Specifically, what the hell to do with Butcher.
Emily Piggot tended toward self-sufficiency in her department of the PRT, to the point that Rebecca could count the number of times she'd asked for outside assistance over the last ten years on the fingers of one hand, and still have a couple left over. This time, she was definitely kicking the problem upstairs for the PRT higher echelons to deal with.
Rebecca knew damn well that getting annoyed at Emily for adhering to the chain of command in this instance was more than a little hypocritical, but she didn't give a shit. Had Piggot pulled a cowboy move and been caught breaking regs in any significant way in the process of solving this, Rebecca would've made a show of coming down on her before letting everything go back to business as normal. As it was, she now had the unenviable job of finding a solution herself, instead of yelling at Emily for doing it for her. Thanks a fucking bunch.
A thought crossed her mind and she picked up her phone then sent a text away, thumbs flying over the electronic keyboard. Is it possible to move good steel through a Doormaker portal?
The answer came back a moment later. Not unless Monochrome is reinforcing it.
Reading it, she raised her eyebrows. Well, that's interesting. One type of dimensional shenanigans covering for another. The downside of that, of course, was that the only way to bring a good-steel-bound Butcher through to Cauldron and put her on ice that way would be to read Monochrome in on the existence of Cauldron itself. Which could be a problem, since the girl came across as being less than fully accepting of authority. Worse, she was one of the few capes on Earth Bet (as noted by Contessa) who could match or beat Rebecca in matters of pure brute strength, and her powerset made it virtually impossible to take her down by surprise.
Well, no use crying over missed opportunities. She cleared her phone screen, then dialled in a number from memory (mainly because she had them all memorised). Elsewhere in Washington, she knew, a phone would be ringing within the Department of Justice. Such was the influence of her position, she knew, it would not ring for long.
"Hello, Rebecca. I'm assuming this isn't a social call."
"You're correct, Charles. A hot potato has landed in my lap, and I need your help wrapping it up and putting it on ice forever." She smiled as she spoke; not because there was even one amusing thing about this situation, but because it was possible to hear the expression in the tone of voice.
"Sounds expensive." Charles was ever the opportunist.
"Perhaps not as much as you might think." She stopped smiling, because it seemed to be sending the wrong message. "When I say 'hot potato', I mean the type with a ticking timer attached to it. It's in everyone's best interests to find a viable solution."
Something in her changed tone must have gotten through to him. "I'm listening."
So she told him.
Monochrome
"Well, that's done." Emma watched as Madison climbed back into her powersuit. Two guards, each armed with foam sprayers, had escorted Butcher into the elevator. From the nonstop stream of profanity—she had a little talent in it, but I'd heard better—she wasn't a fan of the idea, but it wasn't really her call. "What now?"
"Go do our thing, and wait to see which way the powers that be in Washington jump, I guess." I shrugged. "They've got all the information. Director Piggot gave the Chief Director chapter and verse. Whatever call they make, it's not on us."
"What about the Undersiders?" asked Madison.
I shared a glance with Emma, then looked at the suit. "What about them? They screwed around, exacerbated the situation, and now they're under PRT orders. Personally, I'd prefer they be there, doing that, than stealing shit and spreading chaos. And we get more benefit from them running interference for us than just sitting in PRT holding."
Madison seemed to consider that, or at least she didn't say anything for a moment. "Yeah, okay. Good point."
As she tromped out from under the marquee, I jumped up onto one shoulder and Emma scrambled onto the other. The handholds were there for us to grab, and I waited until Emma had a firm grip on hers before I slapped the back of Madison's helmet. "Let's do this thing."
The suit's thrusters lit off and we rose into the sky, heading out over the city.
Even though the two major gangs were now defunct, there were still supervillains left in Brockton Bay. Uber and Leet had apparently broken out of holding and hadn't been recaptured yet, and there were a few other minor villains floating around who had suddenly found themselves the only fish in a reasonably large pond.
The problem was that as a team we were great at putting the hurt on a visible opponent, but our detective skills were somewhat lacking. I considered asking Director Piggot if we could borrow Tattletale to help track the bad guys down, but decided to leave it a few days until the ex-Undersiders had settled into their new role a little more. Given the recent uproar, it was likely the remaining villains were keeping their heads down anyway.
Ideally, they'd be making plans to move out of town (like the Undersiders had been intending to do, before their Butcher encounter) so that problem might even solve itself. We could only hope.
In the meantime, we'd be doing patrols loud and proud alongside other teams such as New Wave (and the Protectorate and Wards) while the ex-Undersiders (I was going to have to find out what they were calling themselves these days) did their sneaky shit on the quiet.
It was a plan, anyway.
Armsmaster
"And there's no other way to do this? Really?" Colin didn't want to think of what he was doing as complaining, but he hated being pushed into a corner.
"No. There is not." The Director's expression might as well have been carved out of granite. "I've already put Livsey's, Lindt's and Laborn's requests into action. Vasil's is up to you. One sit-down computer game with a teenage boy, and we get him as a deniable asset. It doesn't even matter if you win or lose. I fail to see the problem."
He recalled a conversation he'd had with Challenger early in his career, about fighting young villains. Nobody wants to fight kid capes, she'd advised him. If you win, you've just beaten up on a kid. If you lose, then you've just had your ass kicked by a kid. There's no way to come out of it looking good. Nothing in his experience since then had proven her wrong.
"What if this is just a ploy to make me look bad?" It sounded weak, but he kept talking. "If I win, I'm Armsmaster. A well-known Tinker. People will say I had an unfair advantage. And if I lose … well, there'll be all of the above, but I'll also look stupid into the bargain."
"I. Don't. Care." She tapped a nail on the desk in time with the words. "If you win, be nice about it. And if you lose, lose with grace. But you are doing this."
"I have Tinkering to do."
It was his last-ditch effort, and her expression told him how it was going to go before she ever spoke, though he wasn't prepared for what she actually said. "Not without your Tinkering budget, you don't."
Disbelief flushed through his system. "You're actually making that contingent on … this?"
"I am, yes."
He searched her face for any indication that she might be joking, but even his best body-language software came up with a null reading. "You can't be serious."
"I assure you, I am." She placed her hands flat on the desk. "We have here a chance to turn a net negative into a net positive. The Protectorate and the PRT are good at what we do, and so are New Wave and the Real Thing, but the Undersiders can do things that we can't. Or perhaps you're not familiar with the concept of the phrase 'force multiplier'?"
"Of course I'm familiar with it." The admission was jerked out of him before he could even think about it. "You're saying that four teenage criminals are a force multiplier?"
"Yes." Her tone was deadly serious. "They'll be performing intel gathering, recon and harassment on any capes sneaking into the city. The rest of us will come in with overwhelming force, but that will only be made possible by what they do first. You'll know exactly who the opposition is, where they are, and when they'll be most distracted. But in order to do this, we need the Undersiders, and in order to have the Undersiders, you need to sit down and damn well play a computer game."
He wasn't very good with subtext, but he was pretty sure there was something in there about not being such a whiny crybaby.
There wasn't much he could say that wouldn't prove her point, so he simply nodded. "Yes, ma'am. When and where?"
Her smile almost reached her eyes. "Conference Room A, right now. He's waiting on you. Everything's already set up."
"Wait … now?" His eyes widened. "I've never even played the game before!"
The dismissive gesture gave him the strong impression that she no longer cared, if she ever had. "I understand that you're a fast learner. Dismissed."
Stumbling out of her office, he closed the door behind himself. "Did you get that?" he asked, subvocalising the words.
"Sure did." Dragon's avatar popped up in his HUD. "I made popcorn. Ready when you are."
"You … ah … you couldn't give me pointers, could you? Maybe take over for me?" He didn't know she was a gamer, but she was really good with computers, so he figured that was a fair bet.
Her eyes widened. "Why, Colin Wallis! You're my best friend, but I could never help you cheat like that!" He got the impression she was enjoying this far too much. "Sorry, hon, but you're gonna have to win or lose this on your own merits. Now, get going. Your teenaged nemesis awaits."
"That's what I'm afraid of." Grumbling to himself, he headed off down the corridor.
He knew there'd been a reason he disliked the Undersiders.
End of Part Forty-Three