Origins of a D-List Supervillain (19 page)

I was relaxing in Central Command and considering what kind of surface defenses our base needed when I received an email, courtesy of the Wireless Wizard’s bootleg internet. Sadly, even a supervillain isn’t immune from getting spam...or sending it, in the case of my weapons designing career.

Mr. Stringel,

A mutual friend of ours, who tells the most shocking jokes, said you’d be interested in meeting me. I will be in Branson this week and would like to meet with you to discuss a potential business opportunity. Please respond at the below location if you are interested.

V

The reference to EM Pulsive was obvious. Suspicion was almost second nature now, but I followed the link anyway. It was to a book discussion forum started by someone who went by the moniker
Heinlein_FanGurl.
The poster would have a little discussion on which book of Heinlein’s she was reading at the time along with other tidbits like vacation plans, places to eat, and so forth. I studied the posts and tried to determine if this was the elusive Victoria Wheymeyer. If so, then the others must be various criminals she was arranging meetings with. I’d ponder it later. For now, I went to the last post.

Can’t wait for my trip to Branson next week. I’m thinking of bringing along either The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, or Starship Troopers (cuz you know how much I loves me some powered armor). Which do you think I should take?

It was open for guest posting, so I replied.

Speaking as a fellow Roughneck enthusiast, I say go with Starship Troopers. Powered Armor beats moon rebels every time. I’ve been thinking of visiting that city as well and seeing the sights. I hope your trip is everything you hope for.

Thirty minutes later the reply arrived via my email.

Mr. Stringel,

Thank you for taking me up on my offer. The address below is the estate where I will be. It is in a rather remote area and your best approach is from the south. Please do bring your suit. I would like to see it for myself. Also, bring suitable attire for dining.

Looking forward to meeting you,

V

“Almost sounds like a date,” Bobby said when I told him about it.

“Damn!” I exclaimed. “I left the two nice jackets I owned at Leslie’s. Think I should knock over a men’s clothing store? Nah, stupid question. Guess I need to go clothes shopping anyway.”

Somehow, I didn’t think my collection of jeans, sweatpants, and the like would really impress her.

• • •

The first thing I noticed, approaching the estate, was the massive pool. It was the kind that you could invite fifty of your friends to and have a rousing game of Marco Polo in. Instead of the slides, they might as well just put a dock in it. The main building was a three story affair with the garage looking like an additional house had been slapped onto the slide. Slightly to the east was a stable and riding trails, according to the satellite maps I’d studied. Still, it was one thing to see the place on a screen and another to see it sprawling out in front of you.

My hole in the ground seemed somewhat inadequate by comparison.

I spotted the two security guards first. The woman in the large hot tub didn’t immediately register, but she saw me, set down the book she was reading, and climbed out. Considering that she wasn’t startled by a man in powered armor landing a short distance away, I figured I’d found Ms. Wheymeyer. She was a brunette, five eight-ish and in a blue bathing suit. Vicky wasn’t ugly, but she wasn’t exactly smoking hot either.
Somewhere in the middle,
I supposed.

“Isn’t it a little early for the hot tub?” I asked.

Victoria scrunched her nose and shook her head. “It’s never too early for a hot tub, Mr. Stringel. I like to catch the sunrise in it. So, this is your armor. Let me see it.”

I set my bag down containing my clothes and allowed her to circle around me.

“Very nice,” she concluded after a minute. “You wouldn’t believe how many people set out to build their own set of armor and quit when they figure out how difficult it is. It’s refreshing to see a person willing to put in the necessary work.”

“Do you like it?” I asked. “Are you really a powersuit fangirl?”

“You bet your ass I am! I can see a lot of early Ultraweapon in your design. Not surprising since you once worked for him. Did you steal the specs yourself?”

“No, I got them from Max V. Did the rest from memory.”

“You must have a good memory,” she said.

“It’s not photographic, but it’s pretty close,” I replied.

“Well, let’s go inside and have some breakfast. There’s a changing room over there where you can leave your armor,” she said and walked back to retrieve the novel she’d been reading. I figured it would be Heinlein’s classic, but was surprised to see a grocery store romance novel.

“I thought you’d be reading
Starship Troopers,
” I said. My guesstimate said that she was in her mid-thirties, which put her a couple of years older than me.

“I have that pretty much memorized by now. This just passes the time,” she said.

As Victoria turned, I saw a pair of dice tattooed on her right shoulder, with a four and a three facing out, and it struck a chord in my memory. Combined with the way she leaned over to grab the book, it suddenly clicked. “Wait a minute! I’ve seen you before.”

“Really? Where?”

“It was a picture, sent to my cellmate. I’m guessing you know The Gardener. I remember the dice, but you had several more tattoos.”

She also had considerably less clothes on, but that was another matter altogether.

“Oh, that,” she said and laughed, somewhat nervously. “Body painting, but I’ve had my lucky dice for years now. Your memory is very impressive to remember a picture from roughly eighteen months ago.”

“It was a nice picture,” I blurted out and felt immediately embarrassed, thankful she couldn’t see my face.

The lady actually blushed. “You’re too kind.”

My mind tried to picture her and Kenneth as a couple and it wasn’t working. That’s when the other shoe fell. She was either the evil genius behind the mass escape or worked for the evil genius behind the mass escape.

“Something wrong, dear?”

“Just putting puzzle pieces together in my mind. Say, didn’t that prison break happen shortly after Kenneth received that picture?”

She smiled and wagged a finger to me, “Now, now, we’re not here to discuss old news. Go change and let’s talk about what you can do for me.”

Victoria had a brash confidence to her; and that had me getting out of my suit as quickly as possible, which still took about ten minutes—something I’d have to improve on in the next version.

• • •

“Cleaned up, I see,” she said while nibbling on a strawberry. “Please, sit. Do you like blueberries in your pancakes?”

“They’re okay,” I replied, taking the chair across from her and spearing a pair of flapjacks with a fork. “I’m really more of a chocolate chip kinda guy. So, if you don’t mind me being blunt, what exactly do you do and who do you do it for?”

“I guess the closest thing to a job description I have is I’m one part personal shopper and another part event planner. Big events, usually. As to the person I work for, let’s not get into that right now.”

It probably meant either General Devious or the Evil Overlord. Since Maxine was freed during that breakout, I was leaning toward the former.

She drank a glass of milk and reached for a bag. My appetite disappeared when she pulled out a pulse pistol. Fortunately, she set it on the table and it was safe to continue eating. “Do you recognize this?”

I picked it up. It was one of a set of three that I sold two months ago and not one of the ones that Max V had been using. “Of course, I built it.”

“Yes, you did. Of the three I bought, one was broken down by our group of engineers, the other was given to the head of development, and the third is in your hand. The engineering group was suitably impressed by your design.”

I smiled and thought,
As well they should be.
“What did your head of development say?”

“He said it was crude, uninspired, but functional.”

When I frowned, she said, “Coming from him, that’s actually a compliment.”

Oh, really!
“What do you think?”

She held her hand out and I returned it to her. “I think I like it. This one I’m keeping.”

“The grip’s a little oversized,” I said. “I’ll measure your hand before I leave and get you a custom one for it.”

“Well, aren’t you the sweetest thing?”

“That’s usually not something people say to me,” I confessed.

“You should hang out with better people then, Calvin.”

“Maybe. So, you have an engineering team, and a head of development. Why do you need me?”

“Our head is a very busy man and he keeps getting redirected to various tasks. Since he and our engineers are, shall we say, occupied at the moment, I’ve been authorized to do some outsourcing to complete several initiatives that have fallen by the wayside.”

“Such as?”

“This,” Victoria said and reached into her bag handing me some schematics.

I unfurled them and studied the design. It was for a next generation pulse cannon, too heavy for a regular human to use. That meant either a synthmuscle suit mount or robot platform. Still, there were several problems that jumped out at me.

“It’s nice, but it won’t work,” I said after a minute.

“We already know that. We need you to make one that does work. Actually, we need you to make about two hundred that work.”

“Two hundred?” I’m sure my eyes were bulging.
Holy Shit!

“Well, that’s our pilot program. We can negotiate more down the line. It’s a refit program for some of our older Type A robots, to bring them up to the cutting edge, or at least this decade. Promethia is sticking with their plasma weapons and stunners for now, but after seeing your work, our head of development dusted off this half-finished design and is giving it to you to work. He believes you might actually have the wherewithal to complete it and deliver a functional weapon.”

I caught the reference to
some
in her words. If they have more than two hundred robots, they basically have an army. Now, I was leaning more toward the Overlord instead of Devious. He had more robots.

“How many times does it need to fire?” I asked, trying to gauge their requirements.

“As many as possible, but no less than eight,” she answered.

Concentrating, I knew the expense of outfitting each one with a B powercell would be cost prohibitive, so that was out. However, if I used two of my power compressors daisy-chained together with one or two A cells there to keep them from losing charge, it might work. Sure, they’d have to be charged externally, but if expense is a problem, there has to be some give and take.

“Look at you!” Victoria said, pointing at me with her fork. “Already working on the problem. You’re such a geek!”

“Funny,” I deadpanned. “When do you need it?”

“How soon can you make the prototype?”

“Twelve weeks,” I replied.

My hostess smiled and said, “I’ll give you ten.”

“Rush jobs mean a twenty percent markup,” I countered.

“Oh, if I’m paying for a rush job, you’ll be done in eight and I’m only paying that ridiculous markup on the prototype. I won’t pay any more than a ten percent markup on the production run.”

This wasn’t like haggling with Maxine, where my life was being threatened. Victoria was smiling and having a grand old time. So I said, “You know you can pay fifteen.”

“Just like you know you can accept ten.”

“But that cuts into my bank robbing time,” I explained. “That’s easy money.”

“Until the feds sic a super team on your ass, then that well is going to dry up pretty quickly and this offer may not be around then. From what I’ve heard, the Gulf Coasters are already rooting around like pigs looking for truffles. How about we meet in the middle at twelve?”

I scratched my chin, enjoying the mental image of the Gulf Coast Porkers, and said, “The middle would be twelve and a half, but I’ll take it if I can call you Vicky.”

She almost choked on her pancake from laughing too hard before struggling to say, “I only let my friends call me that, but you drive a hard bargain. Twelve, you get to call me Vicky and I get to call you Cal...plus, you have to let me try out your armor.”

What? She’s going there!
“Seriously? You want to test drive my armor?”

“But we’re friends now, Cal,” Victoria whined. “Besides, I know you’ll rig it with a kill switch. C’mon, what do you say?”

“I wouldn’t let my family into my armor, Vicky. I’m going to have to say no.”

She shook her head and offered, “Say ‘maybe’ instead, and we’ll negotiate it at a later time.”

“Fine, maybe,” I said.

“Then, it’s settled. Now, would you like to catch a show with me this evening? I always try to take in the sights when I’m out this way. It’s not Vegas, but it has a certain charm just the same.”

“Maybe,” I said with a grin. “I do have this hot project I should start on and the new boss is a real...”

“Careful, Cal, I have a rolodex full of hit men and assassins at my disposal.”

“...nice lady that I hope to impress.” I finished.

“Well played,” Vicky said and raised her glass of milk to me.

It was the start of one of the nicest days I’ve had since before I decided to quit Promethia.

Chapter Ten

A Familiar, Yet Unfamiliar Face

“I could be doing something else, you know?” I said, firing a burst from my force blasters.

The woman known as Eyelash dived behind the protection of the Dynamic Discus. His energy discs blocked most of attack, but some was absorbed, and the lanky man expertly hurled the two psionic constructs filled with my own power right back at me. One missed and the postal box behind me exploded. The other smacked into my shields. He created another set and jammed them onto studs on his wide belt. Smoke filled one and flame the other.