Chapter Twenty-One — Advice Taken
Isaac carefully rose from the soft cushions of the broken armchair at the center of Mechaniacal’s shattered device, nearly stumbling over the stuck footrest, and found himself surprised that he didn’t feel any obvious after-effects. No aches or pains, no bleeding from the nose and ears, nothing like that. If it weren’t for his surroundings he would have almost thought he’d imagined the whole thing. A soft ticking from his pocket made him pull out the change-watch, seeing the lines on the face of it jitter back and forth, the continuous ring breaking and reforming in a constant fizz until it finally settled back down, maybe a little bit thicker than before but otherwise showing no influence but the one that pointed in his direction.
“Did you get it done?” Sarah called, obscured by the bulk of the chair’s mechanisms.
“I think so!” Isaac called back, clambering through the tilted rings to get out, forced to climb in some places and duck in others, squeezing through gaps in now-misaligned bands. “Can’t tell offhand, but if I did it right, it wouldn’t look like I did anything at all.” He wriggled through one last set of dimmed and smoke-filled glass tubes and dropped a few feet to the floor.
“Well, we’re all still here,” Sarah said, blowing out a plume of smoke and casting a sideways glance at Mechaniacal, who was studying some incomprehensible readouts at a control panel on the other side of the augmentation mechanism. “So you can’t have messed things up too badly.”
“You certainly did something,” Mechaniacal said, looking up from his instruments. “I’m pleased to report it is difficult to tell what, which accords with the intended outcome. Of course, if there is an issue, nothing can be done about it.” He rapped his cane against one of the bent and deformed gears in the defunct frame. “For good or for ill.”
“So what—” Sarah started, but was interrupted by an explosion, the ground shaking and rolling like a ship at sea.
“Ah, our visitors have come knocking,” Mechaniacal said, still completely unrattled as he strode away from the chair and the Orrery without a backward glance. Shay grumbled unhappily, chirping at Astoria as the two raptors surveyed the surroundings. Through the bracelet at his wrist, Isaac could feel they were looking for threats, and while he still couldn’t tell how much they understood about the current situation they definitely realized something was happening.
Gratin hopped out from behind the bar and scurried over to join them, the little lizard-guy almost as unflustered as Mechaniacal. For all that he was more a tagalong than anything, Isaac did appreciate his presence. He was clearly a lot older than he seemed, and his willingness to go along with things without protesting or nitpicking made Isaac feel a lot better about how well they were actually doing.
“So we’re getting out of here after this, right?” Sarah muttered, looking at Mechaniacal’s receding form. “Going home?”
“That’s the plan,” Isaac said, though it wasn’t like they actually had made any plans for afterward. Things had moved too rapidly for that, though it was clear they needed to get ahold of events before much longer. No matter what he had or hadn’t done to contribute to the safety of the world, he still lived in Star City, and ensuring his status there was most important. “Might need to lean on your mom to keep me out of jail, though.”
“Should not be required now today!” Gratin put in, unashamedly listening in. “The Deep Kingdoms accord you a certain status yes. Great King Iy certainly wishes to treat with you when possible!”
“That’s something, then,” Isaac said, glad to have some immediate lifeline. “But we’ll want to get ourselves set up independently, too. Can’t always rely on someone like Iy to be around.”
“You have ideas?” Sarah asked, relaxing slightly as they walked back toward where they’d entered, though the connection between Mechaniacal’s tower and Point Archimedes appeared entirely seamless.
“Some. I got an idea of what I could do while I was inside that thing, if I really worked at it,” Isaac said, not mentioning the temptation he’d had to keep the power that the chair had given him. Of how close he’d gotten to becoming the Tyrant. “If nothing else I’m going to need an actual meta name, not one of the temporary personas. Something like your Scheherazade.”
“Not Chains, huh?” Sarah said with a grin, poking his side.
“Not Chains,” he confirmed, capturing her fingers with his own. “I don’t want to be what that chair made me, but while I was there it gave me enough insight that I know what I want to do with my power now. What I do is control change, but I don’t want to use that to enforce my view of things. That didn’t end so well because it never does, and besides, that’s the kind of thing I hate in general.”
“So, what does that leave?” Sarah stopped as Mechaniacal reached another one of the viewports, rapping his cane against the wall. A distant thrum Isaac hadn’t even noticed faded, at a guess from defenses powering down as Mechaniacal apparently intended to receive the mass of supers.
“Altering materials, for one. Maintenance. Cleanup. Tune-ups, like with your power.” Isaac drummed his fingers on Shay’s armor, where the raptor was practically bumping against him, walking at his side opposite Sarah. “The Custodian, maybe. Hand of Change, if I want to be grandiose.”
“Custodian, huh?” Sarah said, raising her eyebrows. “Didn’t you masquerade as a janitor for a while?”
“Lou, yeah,” Isaac said wistfully. “Kind of my favorite character. Could get a lot done and nobody paid attention to me. And cleaning things up never really causes problems. Well, almost never, anyway. Maybe I’m not going to back to mopping floors, but there’s a lot of problems that can be fixed without fighting supervillains.”
“Or superheroes?” Sarah teased.
“That too,” Isaac conceded with good humor. “The super types are necessary, sure, but I don’t want to be one of them. Speaking of which, what did you have in mind for Scheherazade?” It wasn’t just an idle question. They had probably minutes at most before Star Central arrived in all of its power, and it was better to get their story straight.
“Definitely want to stay independent, that’s for sure,” Sarah confirmed, which was a relief. It had been a quiet point of anxiety for him, even if he was pretty sure that she didn’t have any interest in the gangs anymore. But now that she had her powers back, there were different options. “And I’m not much of a hero either, I think. Too selfish,” she added with a laugh. “No, I think it might be fun to try theatre or something. It’s been ages since I was on a stage,” Sarah added wistfully.
“Then we have something to tell Star Central if they ask,” Isaac said, drawing himself up internally as he prepared to actually meet the authorities. Something of his experience with the Orrery still lingered, giving him a sense of assurance he hadn’t had before. “Because now I know I don’t need to go with them.”
***
“Welcome!”
Ike tapped his fingers worriedly on the control of his travel chair as Mechaniacal’s voice sounded through the speakers. For some reason he wasn’t surprised that the tinker could broadcast on the sub-ether bands the Foirastar used, ones that were only clear in deep space.
“If you could refrain from any more weapons fire, the hanger is open for your arrival,” Mechaniacal continued. Ike hardly trusted the invitation, but there hadn’t been any return fire. It wasn’t any calculus of risk versus reward that decided him, though, but rather that the warnings that bubbled through his suppressed power had suddenly eased a few minutes ago. They’d missed whatever nexus of events had been building, and with it their chance to influence the outcome. What remained was cleanup, and finding out what the consequences would be.
“Bring us in,” he ordered Blinkbulb. “But be careful.”
“Aye, aye,” Blinkbulb said irreverently, spinning the antique wooden wheel and engaging the engines, hands and feet working in a blur. Alerions tilted, sending them banking down toward the hangar picked out by the Foirastar’s sensors, adjacent to where Mechaniacal’s tower was joined to the space station. The speedster kept the shields at two hundred percent capacity, not needing the engines so much this close to their destination, but no attack came.
“If you could keep an eye on the outside, I’d appreciate it,” Ike commed to Moonblast, glad that Machine Head’s work functioned off Earth. Something that wasn’t true for all tinker equipment.
“Until Mechaniacal is in custody,” Moonblast said, which was as far as she would concede. Everyone would want to at least have a look at what Mechaniacal had wrought. Surprisingly little technology was built on the great works of tinkers, due to the difficulty of mass manufacture, but there was always something to learn.
An energy shield hummed into existence behind them as the Foirastar entered the hangar bay, the exterior instruments showing a rapid change in atmosphere to something breathable and warm. It was irksome that even decades later, Mechaniacal’s clockwork was more advanced than Star City’s state of the art. Though it was more advanced than anyone’s state of the art, even Tinkertown’s, so he had hardly failed Star City in that regard.
“Bulk, take point with your squad, coordinate with Glorybeam,” Ike said. Though the former sovereign had never clashed with Mechaniacal, she had an incomparable well of experience when it came to on-the-ground work against the supervillains, especially of the powerful sort. “Squads two and three, support. Machine Head, you’re with Mocker and I.” His fingers worked the keys of his command chair, double-checking the comms groups that he’d set up, which should keep the teams coordinated and cross-talk to a minimum. Another point for Machine Head, though he knew they were thousands of hours of practice away from fully integrating the new equipment. Blinkbulb, of course, would stay behind with one squad on the ship.
The rear of the Foirastar opened, a large ramp lowering on hydraulic struts, and Captain Bulk led the way with his people. The only obvious exit to the hangar, aside from space itself, was a pair of double doors off to the side. One of Ike’s psychic supers – he couldn’t tell which one offhand – opened them remotely, and there was a stretched moment as everyone anticipated some kind of trap or defense. Instead, there was just an entrance to a luxurious room with Mechaniacal, Hartson, and Miller standing there waiting. Next to them were a pair of raptors and the Deep Kingdom member of the Miller staff. Ike did wonder how the little lizard-man had managed to get there, but such things could wait.
“Stand down,” he muttered over the comm network, having to make a snap decision. “Keep it friendly for now.” Though it looked like he could have secured the place if he went in with maximum force, he wouldn’t take the risk if it didn’t prove necessary. Even all these years later, he remembered the early lessons from his mentor and his first days as a super, and the best fight was always one you didn’t start. Forcing a confrontation just wasn’t a good idea.
Some of the supers marginally relaxed, but only some and marginally. Everyone understood that the situation could change at a moment’s notice. Ike’s fingers manipulated the controls of his travel chair, floating him over to and through the double doors while Mocker and Machine Head trailed behind. The other squads kept alert, Bulk leading his people further into the room and skirting around the waiting individuals.
“Mechaniacal,” Ike intoned, floating to a safe distance and regarding the three people there. The tinker looked the same as ever, infuriatingly cheerful and with that annoying look in his eye that implied he knew something Ike didn’t. The Harston boy and Miller girl stood together, the former eyeing Ike with disfavor before his eyes landed on Machine Head. The boy was easy enough to read, but the girl was not. Behind that illusionary mask she could have been thinking anything.
“Director,” Mechaniacal replied, and Ike suppressed a sigh at the appellation.
“Care to explain all of this?” Ike waved his hand to indicate the station, but especially the construct at the far end of the very long room. One half-slagged and sagging, but still bearing the unnamable twists of some dread design.
“Merely tidying up some loose ends,” Mechaniacal said. “Nothing to worry about. I didn’t even need to use it myself!”
“You are going to need to unpack that,” Ike said with studied patience.
“Certainly,” Mechaniacal said, twirling his cane. “Come, sit, drink! I am in a mood to celebrate.” He rapped his cane against the floor and with a clicking sound an entire bar, replete with drinks and a robotic bartender, slid on invisible tracks from its position halfway across the room to near the hangar door.
“Dare I ask why?” Ike inquired, as Mechaniacal strode toward the bar. Between trying to accost Hartson and keeping the far more dangerous tinker engaged, Ike chose to follow Mechaniacal, even if he wasn’t about to take anything from the villain’s drinks cabinet.
“Because we avoided something terrible happening, I think,” Mechaniacal replied, glancing back at where Hartson and Miller were moving in to chat with Machine Head. “Tell me, Director, how familiar are you with the shadow realities that lie outside time?”
“More than I’d like to be,” Ike admitted. Such things were, to most people, an abstraction at best, possibly even a fiction or a metaphor. Only a very few people had the power set or experience to interact with them. It wasn’t unheard of, but travel across time and relative dimensions in space was fairly rare.
“It shouldn’t surprise you to know that I’ve been to such places, and take some care to monitor them. None of us wish for our reality to intersect them, and yet at the same time they reveal much about the possibilities available to us. For good and for ill.” Mechaniacal accepted an Old Fashioned from the robotic hand. “A new one was just created.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” Ike muttered. He’d verify on his own, of course, but he didn’t see a reason to doubt the assertion. The instinct of screaming danger had been strong enough that whatever fate had been averted surely had been imprinted in reality. “Thanks to your device over there?”
“In part,” Mechaniacal agreed. “But I wasn’t in it. The Hartson boy was.”
“I knew it,” Ike said, feeling vindicated in his paranoia. He had been absolutely certain that allowing Mechaniacal to get anywhere near Hartson would be bad for all involved. “He resulted in a shadow reality? What ever possessed you to allow that?”
“He made a good argument,” Mechaniacal replied, sipping his Old Fashioned. “And I had a feeling. I’ve been around a long time, you know, and I’ve learned to trust my instincts.”
“A master of clockwork, working on instinct?” Ike raised his brows. Mechaniacal was a menace, but Ike hadn’t realized how much the man played against type. Most tinkers reframed their world from within their power, which resulted in a certain degree of myopia.
“As I said, I’ve been around a long time,” Mechaniacal said. “Enough to realize some of my own shortcomings. Few of them though there might be,” he added, smiling broadly to show he didn’t truly mean it. “And in this case my investment paid off. The moment I introduced young Hartson to the Orrery, he grasped how his talent could be used, and then pitched his idea to me. What he has done is reinforce the Orrery itself, both its nature and its resistance to outside change.”
“So he is effectively sovereign,” Ike said, as he worked through what such a statement even meant. A pressure against widespread destruction, for one thing, especially world-ending events. But also against fate workings, outer gods, and people like Mechaniacal who came in from alternate realities or other points in the timestream. A good thing, overall, but he didn’t dare think there wasn’t some hidden catch.
“Not yet,” Mechanical disagreed. “His talent was amplified by my devices, but of his own he has not reached that point. Nor does he have the desire, I believe. But he could, yes, which was why I wanted to have a word in private. That shadow reality happened because the boy made a choice to turn away from something terrible. Do not push him so far he has to make it again. If he fails a second temptation, well, it would undo a lot of effort on my part!”
“Trying to apply pressure would be complicated, regardless,” Ike said, already trying to think through how to deal with the boy. Hartson would be a menace if he turned full supervillain, but his abilities were too potent to be completely unsupervised. If for no other reason than he’d already tangled with Blacktime, and that man could push Hartson into something unwise just as easily as anything Ike could do. “We’ll have to keep an eye on him.”
“It might be for the best,” Mechaniacal agreed. “And Director? You should take a vacation. That chair might be miraculous, but it can’t hide how overworked you are. I would rather you not be stretched to the breaking point and become The Director in truth.”
Ike glowered at Mechaniacal. Being scolded by one of the very people who was harrying him at every turn was grating, but he got himself back under control before the chair could inject him with any suppressants to counter a fit of pique. It wasn’t worth the trouble.
“The records say you haven’t had a day off in seventeen years,” Glorybeam said through his earpiece, a touch of worry entering her otherwise neutral tone. “He does have a point. A discussion for another time.”
Ike tapped his fingers on his control pad in an idle tic before moving on. Star City seemed to careen from one crisis to another like a drunken speedster, so his lack of vacation time was expected. It didn’t seem worth commenting any further.
“Regardless of my personal life, we are here because of what you have done,” Ike said, rotating his chair to point in the direction of the defunct machinery deeper in the oversized hall. There was far, far more to the station than the interior might suggest, given the scale of the thing. Ike hadn’t gone along with Teraton all those years ago, but now it was clear he should have. The entire place probably needed to be deconstructed and thrown into the sun to be considered safe.
“Ah yes, I am quite pleased with my little project,” Mechaniacal said, strolling toward it. Ike muttered a few orders into the comms before following, but mostly he let Glorybeam and Vilmonica coordinate. There didn’t seem to be a combat need just yet, but that could change at a moment’s notice. Then there was the disposition of the machinery itself. Without a fight to concretely settle things one way or another, it was difficult to know how to deal with it. Deep space was hardly his jurisdiction.
“Odd,” Vilmonica said in his other ear, watching through the transmitter. Machine Head had needed to crack open the large transmitter on the Foirastar mid-flight to extend the range, but they still had a stream on a second or so delay. Faster than radio, but slower than sub-ether. “Most people would have made the centerpiece of such an apparatus a throne. Not a Sleep-Y-Lad recliner.”
Ike nodded, curious about that despite himself. Most supervillains, and especially tinkers, were egomaniacs. Mechaniacal was no exception, so something like that chair at the heart of some improbably device was a statement. Exactly what, he wasn’t certain, and he wasn’t going to give Mechaniacal the satisfaction of asking. He’d leave it to his staff to puzzle out.
“If you’re quite finished with it, then you’ll have no objection to handing over the remnants so it can’t be used again,” Ike said. Perhaps things had turned out well enough this time, but he was hardly going to leave the station where it was, with its facilities intact. While Mechaniacal might be able to rebuild it, it was only a might — sometimes, certain materials or items were unique. The trick would be to enforce that without resorting to a slugfest.
“Alas, I wouldn’t trust anyone with the remnants of my augmentation machine,” Mechaniacal said. “No, I shall take Point Archimedes with me. I have some classical vinyls here, you know,” he added with the air of confession. “Some books long out of print. Teraton didn’t get everything the first time around.”
“You know we can’t possibly leave you in possession of all this,” Ike said, his fingers hovering over the alert buttons on his chair. He could feel the tension rise as the conversation threatened to turn into something harsher. “It’s Star Central’s mandate to keep supervillains from getting what they want.”
“My dear Director,” Mechaniacal said, unbothered. “I already got what I wanted. Things have stabilized. If I’m correct, you should even find that Glorybeam will be herself again in short order. In such a circumstance, leaving my technology lying around will only risk undoing what I worked so hard for.”
Ike’s fingers reached down to touch the alert button, but something kept him from pressing it. Maybe the comments about how long it had been since he’d had time off had made him doubt his judgement, or maybe he was just influenced by the lack of any overt hostility. Maybe he just devoutly hoped to get through this without putting any lives on the line, his or anyone else’s. Or perhaps he just hoped that Mechaniacal was right about Glorybeam, something he almost asked for clarification on before focusing back on the matter at hand.
“That’s understandable,” Ike said instead. “But you understand I must have some guarantees on your behavior.”
“A reasonable point,” Mechaniacal said, twirling his cane and gesturing toward one of the window-viewscreens. “Perhaps you could call up Moonblast? I would like to purchase my old estate on the lunar surface. My wine was coming along so very well, and I do miss the quiet. You see, Director, I have no reason to meddle now, with the status quo restored. Unless something urgent comes up, of course, but life isn’t predictable.” Ike didn’t fully believe it, but it was true that Mechaniacal hadn’t bestirred himself until Glorybeam was incapacitated.
“That is not as reassuring as you seem to think,” Ike said, keying in a query to Vilmonica and Glorybeam for their opinions — though they would have been likely to offer them regardless. “But I think we would all prefer to avoid a direct confrontation. You are aware that no matter where you end up, we will be forced to keep surveillance on you.”
“I would expect nothing less,” the tinker said cheerfully, brushing imaginary dirt from his sleeves. “We all must keep each other honest, eh? You watch me, I watch you, and hopefully we keep each other from blowing up the world.”
“Or taking it over,” Ike pointed out, and Mechaniacal simply spread his hands.
“I am a supervillain, after all.” Mechaniacal sounded almost demure. “I have a certain reputation to uphold.”
“So it would seem,” Ike sighed. “We will have to work out a proper treaty if you wish to interface with Star City and lunarian governments as something other than a prisoner. Vilmonica, if you could begin drafting that.” If nothing else, Princess Liesta would be happy to have some diplomatic resolution to the prior agreements regarding Mechaniacal, currently in abeyance since he no longer was a prisoner.
“It’s been a while since I’ve been a sovereign political entity,” Mechanical noted with some pleasure. “I’ve always found conquering to be relatively dull.” Ike eyed Mechaniacal for that comment, then decided to leave it alone. He was getting the distinct impression that the supervillain simply liked seeing if he could get a rise out of people.
“That leaves the thorny problem of Mister Hartson,” Ike said, giving the ruined yet still dread device one last doleful look before maneuvering his chair around back toward where he’d left the wayward super. Mocker had been keeping an eye on the boy, though from a distance.
There had to be some accord between Star Central and the rogue super. The abilities Hartson had demonstrated would make him an absolute nightmare if he were to cross over to the side of villainy, and that was an unfortunately probable outcome if things didn’t change. Especially given his legal status, which was less than stellar.
It was no longer a simple matter of a few minor crimes and a moderate talent to be set on the straight and narrow. Ignoring the technicality of their current location in deep space, where laws effectively didn’t exist, the most pressing thing he could hold against the boy was mental influence — influence that had been obviously unintentional and, so far as Ike could tell, curtailed once known. Despite what some people thought, Ike was not in the habit of press-ganging supers into the service of Star Central — for many reasons, but foremost among them the fact that trust and coercion were incompatible approaches.
Hartson had, in the past week or so, managed to make himself some fairly powerful connections. The Deep Kingdom interest alone pragmatically shielded him from any minor official displeasure, and that was ignoring the pull of the Miller family. Hartson was clearly joined at the hip to the Miller girl. Beyond all that, if Mechaniacal was telling the truth, the boy had managed to parley a supervillain’s scheme into something of net benefit to the world. Ike did not like to punish people for doing good even if their route to it was questionable.
Punishing people for playing hero just meant you stopped getting heroes.
Then there was the pseudo-sovereign status. The emergence of sovereigns was, in general, an uncommon thing. Someone that powerful couldn’t be controlled, and often had no need of the incentives designed for the people who still relied on ordinary commerce and housing. Hartson wasn’t there yet, but the potential to push him there was terrifying. Probability and mind control potential in a sovereign ran uncomfortably close to the Sovereign of Lies, and nobody quite knew how many things that monster had permanently altered.
The repulsorlift of his travel chair hummed as he maneuvered it back toward Hartson. Not surprisingly, the man saw it coming and broke off whatever discussion he was in to turn toward Ike. The Miller girl tilted back her hat and took a drag of the strange elongated cigarette holder, eyeing Ike without much favor. Which was unfortunate, as the Millers had generally been strong supporters of Star Central in the past.
“Mister Hartson,” he said in greeting.
“Administrator,” Hartson replied. He visibly drew himself up to address Ike, but that wasn’t the only change. Despite no physical alteration, Hartson seemed to gain solidity, purpose, an aura that shifted him from a relatively ordinary young man to someone dangerous, a feeling almost like being around a sovereign. Ike didn’t need any sensors or input from Mocker to know that he was seeing the effects of a conscious invocation of power, one that set his instincts on edge. Like Mechaniacal, he had been around long enough to trust his gut, however much was left of it. This was exactly the time when he had to be careful not to push Hartson as Mechaniacal had warned, lest Ike force him into a choice nobody wanted.
“I understand we have you to thank for this not becoming a catastrophic level of supervillain scheming,” Ike said, and was rewarded by Hartson looking absolutely bewildered. To some extent, Ike understood Hartson’s antipathy toward Star Central, being one of the Lost Generation. The rest was probably grown from minor incidents over time, an inclination to see the bad more than the good, accumulating into an cascade of dislike.
It was actually a carefully hidden pleasure to gobsmack him by being reasonable. In hindsight, trying to tempt Hartson to his side by pointing out what Star Central could offer would never have worked. Now it was clear that he’d never be part of the superhero crowd, but there were protocols for dealing with independent elements like that. Once Ike had adjusted his thinking, it was relatively simple to interact with the Hartson boy.
“Yes?” Hartson said, definitely a question.
“If nothing else, we can waive the fee and expunge the record we have of a single minor incident of super-crime.” Ike tapped at his controls and sent a message for Vilmonica to do just that. “You are certainly you are not interested in joining Star Central?”
“Heck no.” Hartson said to a muffled laugh from the Miller girl. There was more heat in his voice than Ike thought strictly necessary, but that wasn’t worth remarking on.
“Then I would appreciate that if you intend to use your powers in the future for anything dramatic, you would coordinate with Star Central. There is some literature I am certain The Honorable Sally Miller will provide on that score.”
“I can do that,” Hartson said, still apparently waiting for a trick.
“Excellent,” Ike said, and keyed his chair to make sure his next words were broadcast to everyone.
“Cataclysm averted,” he said, to a noticeable relaxation from the crowd. “For once, it seems that the day was saved before we even got here. While I’m sure that everyone is annoyed at being dragged out here for nothing, it’s better than coming all this way for a fight.” Some of the younger supers, like Lunar Bolt, looked a bit rebellious at that, but the older ones all nodded. Most of them had lost friends due to calamities in the past, and there would be more calamities in the future, but maybe fewer than otherwise thanks to Hartson’s actions. He looked around at the groups of still-wary heroes, back at Mechaniacal, who was sauntering their way with glass in hand, and tapped the stand-down button to make it official.
“Let’s go home.”