Star Harbor Nights

The General was out of uniform. He'd changed to non-descript workman's clothes, the garb of an honest laborer, to oversee the off-loading of the trucks of equipment that had rolled into the yard late in the evening. The heroes who'd come together against their alliance had been canvassing the warehouses of Crescent Bay, but fortunately, they'd been ready to move their operation at a moment's notice to their secondary headquarters, a decommissioned naval shipyard south of the city.

The operation had gone like clockwork. The men would be hard at work until morning, reassembling the machinery and reconnecting the computers, but all the equipment was safely stowed inside and away from prying eyes.

The black van came to a stop outside the main warehouse, which was large enough to accommodate a battleship hull. Both of the front doors opened. A man stepped out from the passenger seat.

"General Bedlam... I trust the weather report is still clear?" he asked, stepping into the light. He was a trim, muscular man, with the face of a thirty-year-old. A neat black moustache and a small white scar under his left eye marked his otherwise clean, smooth face.

The General knew him by his voice, though the face was not the same as the man who'd recruited him for the project.

"Webmistress reports that our pack of do-gooders has not left Kansas," the General said. "Forgive me staring, sir, but... the difference is quite striking. Dr. Langwidere does excellent work."

"You are looking at my true self," Geppetto said. "An accurate reconstruction of the man I was, down to the last detail. The time for masks and false faces is all but over."

"And the scar?"

"A vivid reminder of the cost of carelessness," Geppetto said. "I wouldn't have left it off for the world."

"Which we'll have soon enough, anyway," Bedlam responded. The driver came around the side of the van. She was a slim woman in a fashionable red trench coat, with mid-length copper-colored hair falling over the right side of her face in a Veronica Lake-styled flip. "But, who is your... companion?"

"She's our new head of operational security," Geppetto said. "No reflection on the job you've been doing, but considering the level of attention we've attracted... and seeing as you're about to see your other responsibilities increase... I thought it would be wise to outsource. Do you disagree?"

"No, no, that's a good decision. But... can we trust her? And can she do the job?"

"Have you ever heard of Master Locust Thorn?" Geppetto asked him. He saw the General's eyes go wide; it was a rare sight.

"Is she...?" he asked.

"She is," Geppetto said. "Stiletto, let's have a small... non-lethal... demonstration for the General, if you would please?"

The woman gave a small nod. She raised her left arm and pulled back her sleeve. There was what looked like a wide metal bracelet around her wrist. It took on a slightly wet, shimmery appearance, flattening and spreading out both down her arm and up her hand, running like quicksilver. In no time at all, her hand and forearm were coated in a silvery second skin. She wiggled her fingers to show off the flexibility of the material. Then, she clenched her fist, and the coating thickened, forming a plate gauntlet with spiked ridges. She opened her hand and the mercurial metal flowed upwards, seeming to evaporate as it did so, until she was left with nothing but spiked tips on her fingers.

A flick of her wrist, and these went flying to embed themselves in the side of a crate, forming a perfect star pattern.

"Is that... all her?" Bedlam asked as Stiletto coolly examined her nails. The dart-like metal spikes, separated from her, were already fading away into nothingness.

"It's a part of her, yes," Geppetto said. "It comes up from inside her somehow. I'm assured she has as complete control over it as a yoga master has over his breathing."

"Astounding," Bedlam said. "Miss, you... you did that diplomat during the far east U.N. trade mission, four years ago, didn't you?"

She nodded.

"I signed off on that operation, but naturally, I had no contact with the actual operatives," Bedlam said. "I always wondered how the devil it was carried off."

Stiletto smiled.

"Anyway, don't you speak?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"Some sort of religious thing?" the General guessed.

She pulled back her hair, and the General could see a word written in silvery letters down the side of her face. It read "PENANCE."

"It seems Ms. Stiletto has inadvertently gone against the rules of her brotherhood," Geppetto said. "I don't care to know the details, but I gather that because the cause was carelessness and not disobedience, her master opted to be merciful and accept her silence instead of her life."

"You've taken a vow of silence?" Bedlam said. "For how long?"

She pulled a small notebook and pencil out of her pocket, and scribbled out an answer.

She had written, "Until my tongue grows back."

"Come," Geppetto said. "I'm anxious to see how the work has proceeded in my absence."

In outfitting the base, they'd had to replace the broken and outdated security keypads... but kept the worn and battered casings and key covers. Bedlam punched in the security code and the lock clicked open. He pushed open the door, then turned to find that he and Geppetto were alone.

"She'll be getting to know the lay of the land," Geppetto said. "I don't think we'll be seeing much of her, unless there's trouble."

The equipment... rows of tanks, immense cocoon-like metal shells with hinges down the side, and various laboratory fixtures... were all familiar to Geppetto, though of course, the layout was not. The General lead him to the command center, where C.C. was running a series of diagnostics on the main computer where Drosselmeier clucked and cooed over the motionless, erect form of an unfamiliar woman.

"She's new," Geppetto said. "Powers?"

"Nothing useful for combat... but... there are twelve more just like her in storage," Drosselmeier said without looking away from his prize. "She has within her brains a true living network, exactly what we seek to create through artificial means. If I could be certain that vivisecting one of her bodies would not cause the whole to collapse..."

"Funny to hear a Nazi scientist concerned with human life," C.C. said.

"The needless loss of precious resources deeply concerns me," Drosselmeier said, offended. He turned on C.C. angrily. "I was outraged by the wasteful excesses perpetrated by my contemporaries. Millions died for no reason... they could have died for science."

"Ever the humanitarian," Geppetto said. Drosselmeier finally turned his gaze in his direction, and gasped.

"You look..."

"As I did when we met," Geppetto said.

"Then, there was no sign of... the boy?" the German scientist pressed.

"None," Geppetto said. "If the funeral of the bitch that birthed him didn't draw him out, then he's well and truly dead."

"Is this something we all should know about?" the General asked.

"It's nothing," Geppetto said. "Old business. A potential loose end... but one that time has evidently taken care of for us."

"I'm in this as deeply as you are," General Bedlam said. "If you thought there was even a chance this could affect our plans, I'd like to know about it."

"Very well," Geppetto said, sighing heavily. He nodded towards Drosselmeier.

"Some time ago, Herr Geppetto fathered a son upon a French woman of low reputation," Drosselmeier said. "It was the chance result of a chance encounter, but the woman had no means to support a child and so sought him out for help."

"I was not looking for an heir," Geppetto said. "But, I thought, perhaps God had given me one anyway. The child proved disappointing in every way imaginable, though. Eventually, having exhausted every other possible means of making something of him, I turned to an old friend for help."

"I was working in the field of human augmentation at that point... specifically, cybernetic reconstruction," Drosselmeier said. "We tried making the boy into something of a living weapon, not merely replacing the existing limbs but the creation of whole new ones. It is something that has been done before, but my goal was to create a process that could be applied to anybody off the street... not just individuals born with the right adaptive brain trait."

"Needless to say, the result was a disappointment," Geppetto said. "But he disappeared before we could scrap the project. Since then, I've picked up traces of him here and there, always somewhere on the periphery of society. Sometimes, it seemed like he was tracking me... there was never any real threat, of course. He could barely control the implants, and he must have been in constant pain. These last few years, there's been no sign of him. It seemed likely he'd finally died in a gutter somewhere, but I had to be certain. I needed something that would surely bring him out of hiding, so I took care of his mother's funeral arrangements... a big, showy funeral that he couldn't help but hear about it."

"Wow, guess you lucked out on the timing, huh?" C.C. asked. "Her dying right now."

"I leave few things to luck," Geppetto said. "Perhaps I should have phrased it as, 'I arranged his mother's funeral.'"

"That's cold, man... now I don't know if I'm going to invite you to my next LAN party."

"I don't pay you for your company, C.C., I pay you for results," Geppetto said.

"You haven't paid me dick yet," C.C. said.

"Your money is in escrow, where it will remain until the completion of the project," Geppetto said. "That's a lesson one learns quickly when forced to employ low-life thieves and scum, like yourself."

"I suppose that means your buddies get paid up front," C.C. said. "I guess I should have negotiated my contract a little more strenuously."

"Oh, I do not do this for the money," Drosselmeier said. "I do it for science."

"And what about you, Colonel Klink?" C.C. asked.

"When we take the White House, I'm not just going to be reinstated," Bedlam said. "I'm going to be promoted... to Secretary of War."

"Uh, I didn't really pay much attention in history class," the programmer said, "but didn't, at some point, they start calling that the Secretary of Defense?"

"Well, son, I've always found that the best defense is a good offense."

"Ginchy," C.C. said. "But I think I'll stick with my thirty pieces of silver."

"That is the traditional payment reserved for traitors," Drosselmeier said. "I hope you are merely, what is the saying? Mixing your metaphors."

"Whatever," C.C. said. "The point is, I'm doing this for Robert's Mexican cousin, Mucho... though I do enjoy the chance to play around with all the discarded military tech we've got lying around."

"Play around with it all you want, but most of that junk was discarded for a reason," Bedlam said. "Decades of research went into some of those devices, but most never made it off the drawing board."

"Yeah, because the army's eggheads were too busy refining top-of-the-line technological advancements like the Bradley fighting vehicle," C.C. scoffed. "You wait and see, old man... the fighting gets up close and personal, and it just might be Cheat Code that saves the day."

"The day that happens, I will tear the feeding tube from my throat and dance a jig on my hospital bed," Bedlam said.

"Hey!" C.C. said, spinning his chair around again at the sound of a tone from the computer. "Message from Webmistress... her mole says heroes have met with Rhyme and are heading back. There's a price tag, too... $25,000 for a one line message?"

"No mention of what they discussed?" Geppetto asked.

"Didn't you hear me? It's only one line," C.C. said. "But seriously, you pay her $25,000 per tip? I definitely need to get an agent, or something."

"You had no problems with the compensation when I offered it," Geppetto said. "And you're getting the experimental tech to play with for free. But send a reply offering her one hundred thousand if she can find out what Rhyme told them."

"You don't think she'd play us?" C.C. asked, typing out her message. "Rhyme, I mean."

"Rhyme plays everybody," Drosselmeier said. "We have to take it on faith that she would find it more amusing for us to succeed than it would be if our enemies overcome us."

"I still say we should have liquidated her," Bedlam said. "She's far too dangerous to us to have been left alive."

"Many others have thought the same thing," Drosselmeier said. "Perhaps you could be the one to show them how?"

"Take a boat out and sink her in the middle of the ocean," the General said. "I don't think she can breathe underwater, and even if she's not technically completely dead, there's no way she's coming back from that."

"Isn't she supposed to be Atlantean?" C.C. asked.

"Yes, her mother did supposedly descend from the remnants of Atlantis," Drosselmeier said.

"So... like... wouldn't that mean that she can breathe underwater?" C.C. said. "Because of, like, evolution?"

"Your ignorance of biology is appalling," Drosselmeier said. "There does exist the small possibility that any member of a given population will have the necessary mutation gene to adapt to a sudden change in environment, but as a rule... well, did the people on the Titanic suddenly sprout gills?"

"Well, no, but if the island sunk slowly enough, you'd have a bunch of generations..."

"You would have a bunch of generations of people who live adjacent to water, whose situation would not have appreciably differed from that of the inhabitants of any other island or coastal region," Drosselmeier said. "In any event, it is now reasonably accepted history that the Amazon tribes left the island of Atlantis at the first warning signs of the cataclysm, and were thus spared its destruction."

"Hey, like I said... I never paid much attention to history, but you can learn a lot by reading comics," C.C. said, shrugging.

"That might work," Geppetto said to Bedlam, ignoring the side conversation entirely. "That is, until the next time somebody decides that her expertise is worth the trouble it would take to extract her. There's so many damned psychics and soothsayers in this world that nothing can stay hidden forever."

"Considering we're a secret cabal, that's not exactly what I'd call positive thinking," C.C. noted.

"But... we do not need to stay hidden forever," Drosselmeier said. "Just long enough."