Star Harbor Nights

In the sub-basement of a hospital on a military base a few miles from the Nevada border, the masked detective Thoth worked his way meticulously through a series of battered old file cabinets. Two pencil-thin beams of light shone down from just below the lenses of his mask, illuminating faded letters on worn folders and papers. The contents of each cabinet were alphabetical, though the cabinets weren't labeled and didn't all belong to the same set.

In the era of World War II, the area had been an infamous detention center for American citizens of Japanese descent. After that, it had been mothballed for decades before being repurposed as a special government research hospital for treating the unique medical problems presented by mutant biology.

To say that the significance of the facility's original function was not lost on the mutant community would be something of an understatement.

After the passing of the repressive paranoia of the nineteen eighties--a time when it wasn't uncommon for the parents of mutant children to sign off on risky and invasive procedures in hopes of "curing" their offspring--few mutant patients were treated at Jewell Lake. The building up of Jewell Air Force Base kept the hospital in operation... though at a level well below its full capacity.

That last fact wouldn't be apparent if one simply looked at the personnel files. The hospital was actually overstaffed for a facility of its size. Its annual budget allocation was likewise a good deal larger than should have been.

Security was also considerably tighter than anywhere else on the base, as the two military policemen whose weapons were trained upon the detective could undoubtedly attest.

"Sir! I will not repeat myself!" barked one of them. "Turn around and put your hands on your head! Now!"

Thoth appeared unperturbed. He paused, his fingers still marking his place in the file folders, and lifted his head without looking around.

"Honey?" he called, a questioning note in his voice.

"Sir...?" the MP began, confused. Whatever would have followed was lost to the ages as he and his partner slumped to the floor, each taken out with a nerve pinch that would have given Leonard Nimoy envy.

"You were supposed to be watching my back," Thoth said reproachfully.

"What can I say? Their backs were worth watching, too," she said with a shrug.

"I'll take your word for it," her husband replied. He pulled out a thick green folder. "I've got it."

"Great! What exactly is it?"

"Medical records for one Margaret Millicent Roberts, also known as 'Molly Dolly'," Thoth said. "Her registration files were wiped, and 4B is notorious for not allowing hard copies of sensitive data... but Molly was treated extensively here during the heyday of mutant experimentation, and any hospital is bound to produce mountains of paperwork, even a military hospital with 4B connections. There's enough information in here to take hours to digest properly."

"We've probably only got minutes before these two chuckleheads are due to report in," Bast said.

"Right, and I'd prefer we extract ourselves without attracting any further attention," Thoth said, a little regretfully. He was the more cautious of the pair, but the lure of secret knowledge was always particularly strong to him.

"That means you follow my lead. Absolute stealth, absolute secrecy, and above all, absolute..."

The rather distinctive opening notes of a jazzy Mancini theme emanated from somewhere around Bast's sleek, dark frame.

"...silence," she finished, refusing to acknowledge the irony. She slipped out a slim black phone from a hidden pouch inside her belt and flipped it open. She didn't have to check the caller ID... that particular ring tone was only set for one number: 000-000-0000.

"This is Nine," she said.  She flexed a finger idly, popping out and retracting a curved silver claw from the tip of the glove. "Yes... we're in the basement. Seventh floor? Okie dokie."

She snapped the phone shut.

"The mysterious Mr. Zero says they've got some plague jars tucked away in a cold storage unit upstairs," Bast told her husband. "Wants to know if I would mind popping them in a microwave for a few seconds."

"Right. We should probably make it at least a minute, just to be safe," Thoth said.

"'We' should do no such thing," Bast said. "You've got to get that file out, and besides, this is my assignment. You know the Circle rules. Zero knew you were here, but he called me."

"Alright, just... don't get any of your ideas," Thoth said. "Biological warfare is not the place to get cute."

"Would sticking the dead germs back in the fridge when I'm done count as cute?"

"It'd count as inspired," Thoth said. "They'll know we were here, but if they don't discover the sabotage until later they might never connect it. Not that they could ever publicly accuse us of sabotaging a project that probably should not exist in the first place, but plausible deniability is always good."

"If only there was some way we could see the looks on their faces when they find out..." Bast said, her voice taking on a wistful quality.

"With that sort of attitude serving as an example, it's no surprise that daughter of yours has taken to visiting museums after they've closed," Thoth said.

"Why is it that when she sneaks into an art museum, she's my daughter, but when she stops a gang of kidnappers she's yours?" Bast retorted.

"We're burning moonlight. I'm going to check the hallway," Thoth said. He crept over to the door and peered out. The length of the hallway was lit by emergency lights. "Nobody in sight..."

He turned around to find that his words were doubly prophetic. Bast had disappeared through an air duct barely wider than her head, though, of course that was wide enough. Tucking the thick file folder under his cloak, he swept out of the storage room. He bypassed the elevator and headed for the darker stairwell. The doors were alarmed, but he'd taken care of them on the way down.

He made his way up to the second floor. The ground floor was too full and too brightly lit, but an empty ward on the second floor made a good insertion point for costumed nocturnal intruders.

Unfortunately, somebody else seemed to have had the same idea. To judge by the bodies of the guards slumped against the walls and sprawled on the floor, that somebody had been considerably less stealthy than Bast and Thoth had been. A cursory examination of the tableau revealed that the men were unconscious and stunned, not dead, though some of them appeared to require medical attention. As they were inside a hospital, that was not an immediately pressing concern.

The man who had put them in that condition certainly was. He stood in he center of the mayhem. He was dressed in black, with a tight-fitting sleeveless shirt that displayed his muscles and a series of scars running up and down his arms. A mask was stretched up over his neck and lower face, like half of a hood. His hair, brown almost to the point of blackness itself, was just short enough to not fall into his eyes, and somewhat unkempt.

"You're here for the same thing as I am," the stranger said from behind the mask.

"I think not," Thoth said, visibly casting his gaze among the broken men.

"You've visited the old records room."

Thoth pulled back the edge of his cape to reveal the folder. In doing so, he also positioned his hand closer to his belt.

"Does that make us enemies somehow?" Thoth asked the younger man.

"The trail to Geppetto runs through here," he said. "If that file leads to him, that makes it mine."

"Do you seek to find him, or protect him?" Thoth asked.

"Bury him," the interloper said, lunging forward. There had been no telltale warnings before the movement. If not for the distance between them, Thoth would likely have been caught off guard. He threw a long curved throwing blade, fashioned in the shape of an ibis's beak, and twisted aside. The man knocked the blade away with a sweep of his arm and pivoted as he skidded past the hero, managing to make contact with a sweep kick. Thoth jumped backwards, keeping his balance.

"I warn you, I've honed my skills against a dozen of the world's greatest martial artists," his attacker said as they squared off, scant feet away.

"I'm married to the thirteenth," Thoth said. "I think I'll take my chances, friend."

"The name is Garrote," he said, launching a strike with light-speed at Thoth's head.

Thoth put up an arm to block the blow, turning it aside. In his peripheral vision, Thoth saw a whip-like strand of metal bursting out of the man's forearm just above the wrist. It zipped around behind his head, circling around to ensnare his neck. Thoth just barely got his other hand up between his neck and the grasping tendril, which continued to loop itself around him.

"That won't stop me from crushing your neck," Garrote said. The filament tightened in illustration.

"Fine," Thoth grunted. "Kill me, then."

The man heaved an immense sigh and the pressure immediately slackened, the cord retracting.

"You're a brave man," Garrote said.

"In the absence of hard facts, I sometimes rely on intuition," Thoth said, massaging his injured hand with the other. "But in this case... you could have killed the military personnel far more easily than you could kill me, but you did not. You do not seem like a killer to me."

"I'm not a murderer," the younger man said. "But make no mistake, I will kill. Do you understand the difference?"

"I recognize the distinction," Thoth said carefully. "Though I condone neither."

"Regardless, I will have that file, and I assure you, I can take it from you without killing you."

"You could have it without taking it," Thoth said. "Information is a resource that is not diminished by sharing."

"I work alone. My experience is that when someone offers a helping hand, they're really helping themselves."

"That's your choice," Thoth said. "But since I have the information that you need, you've got more to gain from cooperation than I do."

"You want me to trust you? Give me the file, then," Garrote said. "And then trust me to share it."

"We could just fight some more, but I'm sure the whole base will be on top of us before we come close to settling this."

"I doubt we have to worry about that," Garrote said. "This group was on its way to respond to some disturbance on the seventh floor when they blundered into me."

"The seventh floor?" Thoth repeated, cursing inwardly. He closed his eyes and twitched his hand, setting off a flash bomb he'd palmed at the same time he'd drawn the blade. With a mental map of his surroundings, he was on the move before the blinding glare subsided.

He knew why Zero had tapped Agent Nine for the task... when thousands of lives could be lost due to a careless fumble, you wanted someone with almost supernatural grace. Thoth trusted that Bast wouldn't allow anything to happen to any of the containers. There were different sorts of carelessness, though, and his wife's assurances that she wouldn't try anything cute hadn't left him completely sanguine.

The bio lab wing on the seventh and final floor had an airtight seal with a complex multiscanner on the lock. The device had proved no obstacle to Bast, though, as evidenced by its hemorrhaged wires and the gaping open doorway. Thoth had little difficulty finding the cold storage room where his wife was... he simply followed the sound of frantic shouting.

He was almost there when he heard Bast's voice distinctly say "Whoops!", followed by the sound of breaking glass. He had to throw himself back against the wall to avoid being trampled by the stampede of panicking soldiers which vomited forth from the room.

The next thing he heard from the room was the sound of laughter. He found Bast literally rolling on the floor, evidently too pleased with the results of her little joke to contain herself.

Thoth began to chastise her, but found that he couldn't... no sooner did he open his mouth than he began to laugh as well.

"Was that 'cute'?" she asked him, when she became aware of his presence.

"It," he said, "was adorable. But, come... we need to find an exit."