Chapter 1:
Hidden Camera
There were tons of way in which sometimes-superhero Pandora “Smith” was better than most people. She was beautiful, for a start; that was always important. She was also quite strong, as anyone tracking her early morning weightlifting routine could attest. She was clever, in the top ten percent of her prestigious boarding school for the children of the elite. And it was hard to get more elite than Pandora’s father.
He was a literal king. Sure, of the tiny, not-recognized-by-the-UN nation of Galan in southern Africa, but Galan had used stolen, seven-dimensional alien technology to absolutely devastate would-be European colonizers. And sure, she wasn’t technically, legally a literal princess, on account of the whole “born out of wedlock and stashed on the far side of the world to avoid assassination” thing, but she was still the daughter of a king.
Well, it might slightly more accurate to say her father had been a king. There had been a bit of a messy incident three months back, where he’d thrown his might behind the conquest of Earth by some fool alien warlord. Earth’s heroes had once again saved the day. He’d escaped to continue to act as the supervillain he’d been even as king, but the aristocracy of Galan had taken the opportunity to formally remove him from the office. But then again, that outcome was thanks in no small part to Pandora turning on her father and freeing the bulk of the captured Justice Union, so she could honestly say she’d saved the world.
Not bad for an eighteen-year old.
But of all the ways Pandora was better than everyone else, her favorite was the technopathy. A product of some of that seven-dimensional alien tech (in the form of cybernetic brain implants), the ability to hack electronics of all sorts around her was as amazing as it sounded. She never had to awkwardly listen to half a conversation a stranger was having on the phone. She didn’t need to look at her phone to probe the internet for answers for whatever the inane question of the moment was. Not only did she not need ear buds to listen to romance novel audiobooks while working out, she could switch from one spicy story to another without slowing down her reps—which had come in handy just this morning.
The best part of the technopathy however, was that so much of modern life took place in front of cameras. Cameras she could hack into and use to watch herself go about her daily affairs. There was a security camera in the gym that confirmed Pandora was a beautiful, beautiful girl, even sweaty and before her shower and makeup. If there was one thing she never got tired of looking at, it was herself.
Pandora watched herself sigh in satisfaction at a completed workout before wiping down the last machine and heading out. She had to switch to a different camera in the hallway to watch herself walk to the locker room. This early on a Saturday, she was the only one about. She did work out with her friends, but the only ones who had an interest in lifting weights were her boyfriend Chad and his bros. The last thing Pandora needed was to spend more time with those losers—not that they would wake up this early.
She had to shift to another camera as she entered the locker room, and paused to admire the muscles in her back as she peeled off her cute, pink workout gear. Damn, was she perfect. Well-defined muscles moving under deliciously dark skin, but nothing bulky or distracting from her perfect femininity. That was how a woman was supposed to look.
Pandora’s hands stopped at her generous hips as she was about to remove her underwear.
She was watching herself through a camera. In the girls locker room. At her elite boarding school’s private gym.
This room should not have a camera.
This room hadn’t had a camera on Thursday, when she’d had PE.
Keeping her bare back pointed at the camera, Pandora turned to look where the video feed was coming from. Even watching her own eyes through the feed, it took her a moment to find it. The camera was well hidden in a vent.
She pressed her lips in concentration as she pushed harder into the camera’s circuitry. It was a dinky thing, barely able to buffer a minute or two of video, but it was tied into the school’s wifi, broadcasting to a static IP address.
Someone was streaming video of her getting undressed to some computer somewhere.
She was going to do something violent about that.
First thing first: Pandora shut down the camera. She left the network on, streaming the now-solid-black feed to its unknown location. Pandora’s supervillain father had given her some code for this sort of thing, uploaded directly into her neural implants. It was a bit of spy tech for tracking IP addresses. She didn’t know how it worked, but did know it could trace the location of anything not overly obscured by VPNs or whatever tech governments used.
The code worked, popping an address into a corner of her mind, just a few miles away in the Ensberg suburbs. The sort of place you might live if you were some schoolyard pervert looking to look at your classmates naked; not a likely location or level of technical sophistication for a deliberate or well-thought-out blackmailer.
Unfortunate. As a cape, a member of the Justice Union who had saved the world once already, Pandora wasn’t allowed to hurt this asshole the way they deserved. Too bad.
She locked her phone and her clothes in a locker and walked towards the showers. She’d call her team mates while she got cleaned up. Yet another perk of technopathy.
Chapter 2: Kick Down the Door
Pandora “Smith” had no idea why her teammate, Luna Hellsing (cape alias Moonless) was having so much trouble with this simple concept. “I’ll explain it when the rest of the team gets here, Hellsing.”
Luna held up her hands, clenched them into fists. But she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, forcing herself to relax. She was three years Pandora’s junior, but had more than a decade more experience being a cape. She also wore a literal cape, a black velvet affair that barely reached her waist. Luna was an overly goth girl, with unhealthily pale skin and black-painted nails. The cape was functional for her, holding a bit of shadow around her that she could use for her shadow control powers. She coordinated her outfit around it, complete with waistcoat, puffy sleeves, stompy boots, and a skirt with petticoats. If Pandora hadn’t seen how effective the skinny girl could be in the getup, she wouldn’t have believed it remotely practical for cape work.
She also had no idea how Luna managed to ride around on her bicycle and not look completely frazzled. It was one of only a few things she could respect the younger teen for.
“So what? We’re going to sit here, on a suburban street corner, and not talk?” Hellsing faked a smile and waved at a heavyset middle-aged woman walking a dog. Pandora tried to do the same, as the white lady was eyeing her suspiciously. The African cape, under the identity of Princess Aetherium, had been officially registered with the Justice Union for over two months now, and her chrome armor crossed with glowing violet energy lines was fairly distinctive. You’d have through people would recognize it by now.
“Aw, Hellsing. Do you actually want to talk to me?” Pandora gave her a sarcastic smirk. “Because I still hate talking to you.”
“Ugh.” Luna rolled her eyes and walked her bike a dozen or so feet away. At least she didn’t bring up the time Pandora had thrown her into the Atlantic yet again. Better yet, she stayed over there, not further ruining Pandora’s already bad day.
The two teen capes stood in acrimonious silence in front of the a house with a prominent “For Sale” sign. Luna pulled out her headphones and started listening to what technopathy confirmed was more of her classical music. Pandora returned to her audio book.
Half a chapter later, the last two members of the Scions of Shadow arrived. Rorn son of Rore was, by far, the more prominent. The literally bull-headed minotaur was massive. He stood over seven feet tall, if you counted his horns, and was almost cartoonishly broad-shouldered. He also categorically refused to wear a shirt, showing off impressive musculature covered by black fur. He was jogging down the street at the speed that was slow by the standards of cars, but genuinely superhuman by the standards of bipeds.
The last member of the team was cradled in his arms. Dakota Lyon (cape name Fletching) was the youngest member of the team, and by far the least powerful. The closest thing she had to super powers were some trick arrows that had been a “welcome to the Justice Union” present from Artemis (the cape, not the goddess). Thus far, she’d managed to be more of an asset than a liability, although at the moment she appeared to be asleep, curled up in Rorn’s arms, head resting against his chest. Her cape outfit was a green tunic, matching the stupid olde-timey cap that had a point that hung down between her shoulder blades.
“You’re late, Son-of-Rore.” Now that she was on mission, she was Princess Aetherium—the greatest of the Justice Union’s many heroes.
“I thought you said it wasn’t an emergency,” the minotaur protested. He half-dropped Dakota, holding her shoulders but letting her slump to the sidewalk. The youngest member of the team yawned as she started to wake up.
“I said no one was in danger, and that you should get here quickly. Time is of the essence, Son-of-Rore.”
“So maybe stop yapping and tell us why I just biked all the way out here first thing on a Saturday morning.” Luna sounded cross. Good.
“This morning I discovered a hidden camera streaming video from the woman’s locker room to a house just down the street.” Princess Aetherium looked each team mate in the eyes. “It’s remarkably unsophisticated, likely the work of some idiot child, so we’re going to put the fear of God into him.”
Luna’s anger visibly subsided. She rocked her head, stretching her neck. “Okay. Yeah, let’s do this.”
However, neither Dakota nor Rorn reacted the way Princess Aetherium wanted. Dakota, still yawning, asked, “Isn’t this a step down?” Rorn just looked confused.
“A step down, Lyon?” Princess Aetherium demanded.
“Two weeks ago we were fighting a kaiju, and last week we went on a rescue mission to faerie.” Dakota yawned yet again. “This seems…”
“I’m sorry the criminals aren’t exciting enough for you, Lyon. I thought you wanted to be a cape to help people.”
“I mean…” Dakota looked aside. “I wanted to have exciting adventures…”
“Excitement is over rated,” Luna replied. “We’ll be fighting aliens or getting thrown into the Atlantic soon enough.” There it was. The goth girl never let that one go.
“Can we go back, for a sec.” Rorn looked even more confused than earlier. “What exactly did this person do that was bad?”
Princess Aetherium sighed. This world was very different from the one he lived on until only a few weeks ago, so she did her best to be patient with him, but Rorn did not make it easy. “A camera is a type of scrying device that allows him to spy on the girls of my school—including me—while we’re getting changed and showering.”
“I know what a camera is,” Rorn snapped. The minotaur got equally annoyed whether you assumed he knew less or more than he did about the modern human world. “What I mean, is why are we, I don’t know, fighting him about it?”
“Seriously, Rorn?” Luna asked.
“Rorn’s people have no nudity taboo.” Dakota yawned again. “He says in the mountains back home, his people usually didn’t bother with clothes.”
“I understand why you humans need clothes.” Rorn sounded defensive. “Like you get cold and cut and stuff. And human world, human rules, so, y’know, pants. But, like, what’s the big deal?”
“Ugh.” Luna rolled her eyes. “It’s a massive deal, Rorn. It’s creepy and dangerous for women to have pictures like that taken, and then shared across the internet. Once that stuff gets out, there’s no way to get it back, and it changes how almost every man looks at you.”
“Okay, okay.” Rorn held up his hands. “Human world, human rules. If you say we need to scare this guy, I’ll scare him.”
“Are we sure this isn’t a job for the police?” Dakota asked. She only now was taking her dinky compound bow from Rorn’s hands.
“Absolutely, Lyon,” Princess Aetherium replied. “Virginia law enforcement has done an embarrassingly bad job of protecting women from this sort of harassment thus far. It’s barely a class one misdemeanor. People get punished with a fine.”
“A fine what?” Rorn asked.
“A small fee, Son-of-Rore. The point is this asshole tried to creep on my friends. I will make them regret that.”
“Whatever you say, Captain.”
“She’s not a captain,” Luna interjected. “Justice Union teams don’t have captains, and Pandora’s ego is big enough already.”
“It’s Princess Aetherium, Moonless,” the team leader corrected her. “We’re on a mission now.”
Chapter 3: Into the Fire
Rorn son of Rore had no idea how Pandora identified the house with such confidence. All the houses in this area—and there was a great abundance—looked so similar. Similar shade of neutral blue-grey paint. Similar two story construction. Similar garden of unnaturally short grass in front. But she was very confidant this was the right one.
The minotaur took point, more on general principle than anything else. No one was expecting real violence, but humans were very fragile without his divine blessings. He also was by far the best at kicking down doors. He went easy on this fragile pile of planks, his hoof not even knocking the door off its hinges.
The inside of the house greeted them with a blinding flash.
Rorn closed his eyes against the roiling red light, but it was still there when he opened them.
The house was not.
He, along with the three human girls of the Scions of Shadow, appeared to be standing in tunnel drilled though the light. Only… standing might have been the wrong word. The tunnel seemed to be flickering past them, clear shapes and patterns in the light flying quickly and in concert. But there was no other sense of motion. Not so much as a breeze plucking at Luna’s hair and skirts.
Rorn glanced at his hooves. He could see the light streaming past below them, but they were firmly planted on solid nothing.
The minotaur let out a small curse in his native tongue.
“It’s an aetheric causeway.” Pandora’s voice was iron. “We’ll be out soon. Be ready, everyone.”
“So cool.” Dakota’s voice was a summer’s gentle breeze.
As sudden as the tunnel of light was on them, it was gone. The sudden change made Rorn blink, and he was blinking against harsh afternoon sunlight.
He glanced around, looking for threats. There was soft red-gold sand underhoof, which extended a great distance in most directions. There were dark red rocks, some small and scattered in the sand, some towering several times larger than human houses they’d left behind. Of those houses, there was no sign. Nor any remnant of the empty, grassy gardens. Not for a long, long way.
“Not again,” the minotaur grumbled.
“Predictable as ever, your highness.” A voice spoke from the nearest giant stone. Its base was only a few dozen feet away, but the platform the speaker was on was at least twenty feet up. It had a railing, but otherwise looked wind-worn and natural.
The speaker wasn’t human, but he was at least shaped similar to one. The skin of his face was a sandy bronze, and his short-cropped hair a bright azure. The rest of his body was covered in a vaguely military uniform. A pair of leathery wings were peeking over his shoulders—far too small to be of any practical use.
The speaker was flanked by two bright green, humanoid lizards. Although the two were clearly the same species, given the animal-like shape of the head, they were very different from one another. The one on the speaker’s right was obviously male, and a hulking brute of one. He had some sort of oversized cudgel resting on one broad shoulder. The one on the speaker’s left was much smaller, slimmer, but noticeably female. She was toting what looked like one of the laser-ray rifles used by the fake people in Dakota’s anime cartoons.
Both lizard people were wearing tight-fitting black pants and white tank tops that stopped in a frayed edge above their midriffs. His was stretched tight by his muscles, but hers was so baggy it hung off one shoulder. They were both smiling.
“Tybid,” Pandora shouted up at the blue-haired creature. “I can’t say it’s nice to see you again.”
“I would apologize for the deception used to bring you here, but your highness’s means of communication were all compromised by our enemy. I do just wish to talk, but given how our last encounter ended, I came prepared for another betrayal.” He lifted a one-handed laser-ray looking weapon of his own, pointing it away from the four of them at the ground. Rorn had forgotten what the one-handed ones were called.
“Hi.” Dakota bounced, raising one hand. “I’m Dakota Lyon—I mean Fletching. It’s super cool to meet you. Uh, what are you?”
Pandora glanced back at Rorn, drawing the minotaur’s attention. He missed Tybid’s response as she whispered. “Those are alien mercenaries that worked with my father, Son-of-Rore. We’re about to hurt them.”
“Your father who tried to conquer the world?” Rorn had never gotten the full story about that.
The armored girl gave a small grunt. And the same time she made a small movement of one gauntleted hand. A scooping motion, similar to one he made during their practice sessions.
“Please—” Tybid interrupted whatever Dakota was saying. “I am trying to talk to the princess.”
“But you’re the first alien I ever got to talk to.” After a second, Daktoa added. “Who didn’t try to kidnap me… If you don’t count the Azurian.”
“Now!” Pandora whispered. Rorn moved, scooping his hand as the Scions of Shadow’s leader had, as she hopped back to land a foot in it.
The minotaur heaved, tossing the armored human upward. At the same time, she activated the repulsor beam in her boot. Rorn slammed one knee into the sand, the beam pushing downward with several times Pandora’s weight.
Luna slipped under him and vanished into his shadow. He didn’t see another shadow for her to emerge from, but she couldn’t stay in the shadow world too long.
Pandora couldn’t fly, but her ability to move herself this way and that with her tractor and repulsor beams came close. And she was good at it.She deactivated the repulsor in her boot a split second before Tybid fired his hand-rifle. The moment she did, she activated a tractor beam built into her gauntlet, pulling her and the large male lizard towards one another. The sudden change in motion fouled Tybid’s shot, closed the distance, and pulled the largest foe off the balcony.
Luna emerged from some unseen shadows up on that level, pulling the lizard girl’s weapon to the side, and slamming her chin with a palm strike that sent the green woman sprawling.
This was enough for Tybid, who vanished back into a cave of some sort in the rock. He shouted something as he disappeared, but the minotaur didn’t catch what.
The large lizard man on the sand drew Rorn’s attention. He rolled his shoulders, and hefted his club. An axe blade made of buzzing light formed around it. “Well,” he said, in English. “Looks like I need hostages, and you don’t got any weapons.”
Rorn rolled his own solders and settled into a fighting stance. “Weapons are overrated.”
“Wait, what just happened?” Dakota sounded afraid.
“Don’t worry,” Rorn smiled. “I got this.”
The two large men stood silently, taking each other’s measure. The lizard alien was large, easily as large as the minotaur, and with just as big a smile on his face. His laser-axe was steady in his hands. His movements, slight as they were, were that of a practiced fighter.
This should be good.
The lizard moved first, rushing forward with his axe. He underestimated Rorn’s divinely gifted speed.
Rorn stepped into the swing, catching the haft of the axe and following up with hard strike to the lizard’s gut. Taken off-guard by the minotaur’s supernatural speed and more-than-mortal strength, the blow sent the alien sprawling. Rorn smirked, hefting the laser-axe in one hand.
The lizard was back on his feet quickly, rolling to put some distance between him and his foe. The smile hadn’t disappeared from his face. His eyes darted briefly to the axe in Rorn’s hand. The minotaur met his gaze and said, “You shouldn’t depend on weapons. They make you weak.” He then broke the laser-axe over one knee.
That turned out to be a mistake.
The haft had been metal, but the thing had been light enough, Rorn had assumed it was a hollow tube, something that would yield easily to a minotaur’s strength.
The haft did bend, and the laser-blade did flicker out.
But Rorn bellowed in pain, nearly collapsing when he put weight on his knee.
The lizard chuckled, one eyebrow raised. “Better weak than stupid, I guess.” He took a small step to the side and let one of Dakota’s arrow’s fly past.
Tossing aside the bent haft Rorn snarled at him. He took one step forward, but limped badly.
His foe was quick to capitalize, closing and landing a quick blow to the side of Rorn’s head.
It was a probing attack. A quick in an out to designed to avoid counter attack. But he was not quick enough to avoid Rorn’s fist.
The minotaur’s blow connected with the lizard’s collarbone harder than he indented. Rorn heard the bone crack.
The green bastard staggered back out of range faster than Rorn could follow with his injured knee. The minotaur grit his teeth against the pain.
The lizard’s left arm dangled uselessly at his side. He staggered back a few steps further from Rorn, before glancing down at it.
Then he laughed.
The lizard man shook his shoulder, and Rorn heard a second crack. The alien rolled his shoulder, and laughed louder. “There. Good as new.”
“Lookout, Rorn!” Dakota called. “He’s got a healing factor!”
“Oh,” Rorn adjusted his balance. “Fun.”
The two rushed towards each other, Rorn limping. They traded blows, neither landing a real hit. The lizard moved towards Rorn’s weak side, exactly as the minotaur predicted.
Rorn caught his foe’s wrist, and put all his strength into a hard pull. The lizards staggered, but soon found himself caught in the minotaur’s embrace. One of the lizard’s arms was trapped, but with Rorn situated behind him, there was little he could do.
Teeth clenched against the pain his stance was putting on his bruised leg, Rorn began to squeeze. Healing magic or not, the alien would need to breathe.
The lizard fought, swinging with his free hand, but not having the angle to land a blow that mattered to the blessedly tough minotaur. He pushed with his legs, trying to knock Rorn down, but the minotaur’s stance was too solid.
Rorn heard the sound of ribs cracking. “You should give up.”
“Gleex never gives up,” the lizard wheezed.
Something green hit Rorn’s face. It was barely a slap, but the warm appendage groped around his face.
The lizard’s tail. Rorn hadn’t had to grapple with a tailed humanoid before.
He hoped for a moment that it wouldn’t matter. It didn’t seem as strong as the lizard’s arms. But then the lizard found what he was looking for: the tip of his tail dug into Rorn’s eye.
Taura’s gifts to her minotaur children made them extremely difficult to seriously hurt. But it was an incomplete gift: his flesh, bone, hide, hoofs, and horns were fortified against all harm. But his eyes were as fragile as any mortals.
Rorn broke the grip rather than lose the eye. One of the lizard’s feet slipped in to catch his ankle. The minotaur rolled, creating some distance and keeping himself from falling prone.
The lizard-man took two short, wheezing breaths, and then thrust his chest out. His ribs snapped back into place with an audible crack.
The he started laughing. His face was consumed with madness when he turned to face his foe again. “Nice try,” he laughed.
An arrow flew towards the lizard’s feet, but he hoped over it without so much as turning his eyes from Rorn. “Oh, come on,” Dakota protested.
“Let’s go, bull-man,” the lizard laughed. His long tongue was lolling from one side of his mouth, slurring his speech. “This’ll be fun.”
“Let me handle–” Rorn was interrupted by a flash of roiling light.
A tunnel, much like the one that had brought them to this forsaken desert, had opened behind the lizard and sucked him in. It was an odd visual, the green alien sliding back into the distance while standing perfectly still.
It happened so fast, it left Rorn blinking.
“Sorry,” a woman’s voice called from up at the ledge where Pandora and Luna had vanished. “Sorry. My cousin’s healing factor releases a lot of endorphins, and makes him a bit crazy. And we really didn’t want him to be eating anyone, so… sorry.” The smaller, female lizard-alien was standing alone on platform on the rocks. There was no sign of Pandora, Luna, or the blue-haired alien (was his name Tybid?).
“I was fighting that,” Rorn bellowed.
The lizard gave a little chuckle. “Well. My cousin can heal from any injury. So you weren’t going to win.”
“You don’t know that.” Rorn limped towards her.
“Is that something all of you can do, or is that, like, his mutant power?” Dakota was back to sounding excited.
“All of who?”
“Whatever… species you are? I’m sorry, the alien species database is, like, really, really, big, so I haven’t finished reading all of it yet.”
The lizard woman cocked her head to the side. “I’m sorry, who are you?” Then to Rorn, she added, “Who is she?”
“She is Fletching, Killer of Tigers,” Rorn growled. “And she’s really not the one you should be worried about.” He was almost close enough to where he might be able to leap up to the platform. Just a few more steps.
“Killer of Tigers? Wow, I sound badass!”
Rorn couldn’t help but wince at that.
“You know what,” the lizard woman said. “I don’t think I need to worry about her.” Rorn saw her aim what looked like an inverted buckler at him.
The blast of sound slammed him into the sand and left his ears ringing.
Chapter 4: The Real Stakes
Pandora “Smith” did not consider it a particularly good idea to chase the paranoid alien mercenary into a warren of tunnels he’d had who knows how long to make dangerously secure. Unfortunately, justice demanded he not be allowed to simply go free, and so Princess Aetherium gave chase.
She did have several advantages over him. Firstly, technopathy that alerted her to some of his traps, and could easily bypass others. Secondly, he didn’t actually want her dead. If he did, his greeting would have come at a great distance from the barrel of a sniper rifle, rather than an elaborate scheme to kidnap her to the Red Desert.
But this was still Tybid, the Ghost of Arrik. Princess Aetherium technopathically disarmed two electronically controlled bombs, then forced a shut down of one of her father’s gun turrets. She even paused long enough to give that one a good stomping, just in case Tybid did have one of her father’s overrides for her technopathy.
Tybid’s trapwork was troublingly thorough. She wasn’t the first person with Galanish brain implants he’d battled. Princess Aetherium was careful enough that she saw the tiniest glint of the steel line that connected to a simple chemical concoction, devoid of electricity and too simple for her tech-controlling implants. Her armor wasn’t going to protect her from a shrapnel mine like that.
Well. Tybid certainly had her father’s flare for the dramatic. Princess Aetherium stepped over the line, and proceeded cautiously deeper into the cave. She made only a few steps before she heard the tell-tale clink of the line being tripped.
She spun to see Luna Hellsing had followed her, and was looking carefully at the trap she’d just tripped. Her stupid goth boot was still gently resting on the trip line.
“Moonless!” Princess Aetherium shrieked as she propelled herself with a repulosr at the wall of the cave behind her. The aetherium armor she wore certainly wasn’t up to the task of dealing with that kind of mine, but it was much more than Luna had.
By the time she hit her teammate, the armored cape had her eyes closed, braced for the explosion.
Shouldn’t there have been an explosion by now?
She opened her eyes to the confusing clouds of nothing that was what Luna called “shadowside.” A blink later and the younger heroine had slid them back into normal reality. There were still echoes and tinkling metal falling out the new holes they’d blasted into the wall behind the shadowy cape.
Then Moonless had the audacity to act pissed. “What the shit, Pandora? You could have been killed!”
“You tripped a fucking claymore, Moonless.”
“Yeah.” Luna was acting like Princess Aetherium was the idiot here. “I wanted to be sure it wasn’t still armed if there was a fight.”
“By blowing yourself up?”
“In case you didn’t notice how I just saved your fat ass, I can slip shadowside before the detonation, and not die. Which would have been a lot easier if I didn’t have to drag you along with me.”
Princess Aetherium took a deep breath. Luna wasn’t actually the enemy here. “Why would you think that was a good idea, Moonless?”
“Because I’ve done it before? Grandmother Night, Pandora, have you forgotten how long I’ve been doing this?”
Princess Aetherium put her face in her armored hands. This was exactly the reason the two of them had agreed to do what they could to sabotage themselves in order to get the team disbanded.
Wait a minute.
“We can fail this,” Pandora said.
“Yeah, exact—what?” That had not been what Luna had been expecting.
“There’s no one in danger here. We can just give up. Our goal was to get the team disbanded, remember, Hellsing?”
“I…” Luna stepped back to the shrapnel-scarred wall of the cave. She had agreed to the plan, but her goody-goody instincts kept getting in the way of actually implementing it.
“For all we know, Tybid’s goal is to lure us into this trap and capture us here. Falling back and getting support is the right play, Moonless.”
Pandora turned her head as the part of her cybernetic brain that was scanning for threats felt a speaker turn on. She silenced it, pulling the sound it would have made directly into her brain. I actually would prefer you stay out of here, your highness. These traps were intended for other foes.
It took Pandora a moment to find the mic Tybid had to have been using to listen in. It wasn’t near the button-sized speaker. She forced the mic to send audio of her voice saying I’m blocking the audio so Moonless can’t hear you. What do you want, Tybid?
The speaker attempted to say I just want to go home, your highness. After the debacle on Warlord D’jaxx’s battleship—thanks for that by the way. We were struggling to figure out how to get out of that without compromising our reputation.
Sure, Tybid, Pandora replied, hoping the imitated mic input would fully capture her sarcasm.
I’m serious, your highness. We are quite grateful. As I was saying, our ship was in the battleship’s hanger when it went down. Our past actions have left local authorities uninterested in helping us get home, leaving aside the fact that they’re largely unable.
You have access to an aethericcauseway terminal, Tybid.
It’s been compromised, your highness. Gexxa cannot tell if it is something your father did, or if it is interference from the folks back in Galan who deposed him.
What do you expect me to do about it, Tybid? I’m being closely monitored; the capes don’t really trust me.
There was a brief pause. I want you to send a message to your father.
Luna chose the worst possible moment to make up her mind. “Fine. Let’s do this. We’ll run away.”
Pandora turned on her game face. She couldn’t let her teammate know anything was wrong. “Well, go, Hellsing. I’ll be right behind you.”
What makes you think I even can get a message to my father, Tybid?
Well, for one, the Justice Union would not be monitoring your communication if they did not think it was possible. And please recall that I was there when your father gave you that armor. I know what the two of you mean to each other. There was weight to the silence that followed Tybid’s words.
Do you promise you just want to leave, Tybid? Princess Aetherium asked. There was an argument to be made that justice was better served if they were captured and imprisoned, but that wasn’t really wasn’t what motivated a true hero like Princess Aetherium. She was in the game for the far nobler cause of helping those in need. Tybid, Gleeck, and Gexxa certainly weren’t innocent, but they were trapped in an alien world they wished to escape. One that would be better without them in it.
I solemnly swear by the reputation I hold so dear that I will be gone from this planet as quickly as I am able. I just need the help of someone like your father.
Was this the right thing to do? Princess Aetherium existed to help people in need. I will send him a message, Tybid. There’s no guarantee he’ll want to hear from me after…
Your father loved you a truly unreasonable amount. There is no sin you could commit that he would not forgive.
Pandora very much wanted that to be true. Unfortunately, that was not the sort of man the Aetherium Warmonger was.
There was no time for sentiment. Moonless had already disappeared around the twisted cave ahead. What should I tell him, Tybid?
Tell him we wait at the seventh place. He will know what that means, and you almost certainly do not.
It stung a little that, even after all this, her father was keeping secrets from her. But she really couldn’t blame him. In the end, she had betrayed him, after all. Good bye, Tybid. I hope we do not meet again.
Likewise, your highness.
Chapter 5: The House Brought Down
Luna Hellsing, also known by her cape alias “Moonless”, was finding it difficult to just… walk away from a supervillain.
It wasn’t like she’d captured every villain she’d gone up against. Villains had gotten away from her before. She’d been forced to retreat. She’d even been completely knocked out of fights before. Heck, that was how she’d first met Pandora, given the whole tossed-into-the-Atlantic thing.
But this was different. This was her deliberately choosing to let a villain go. A genuinely scary villain. Tybid and his team had used hidden cameras to capture pictures of teenage girls in a state of undress, and then deliberately kidnapped her and her team for unclear purposes. These were very much not villains who should be allowed to remain at large.
Yet that’s exactly what she was doing. Just walking away and letting them go free.
It sucked. She particularly hated that Pandora made it seem like a genuinely good idea. Luna was supposed to be a hero, not someone who justified doing the wrong thing so easily.
The sound of raised voices broke her out of her reprieve. She was about to emerge from the darkness of the cave to the harsh, hot desert sun. The lizard-woman she’d incapacitated earlier was yelling, “You don’t see me calling you a snarg just because you’re an ugly, hairless rat.”
“What’s a snarg?” Dakota’s voice came back. She was more distant, probably still down on the sand.
Luna emerged from the cave to find the lizard-woman standing next to the odd, cockpit-looking terminal she’d barely noticed earlier. The ziptie cuff Luna had bound her with was still hanging from one wrist. Shit, was she one of the super-flexible lizard-like aliens?
“It’s an ugly hairless rat!” the lizard-woman yelled. “Zloop, girl; pay attention to context clues.”
Luna glanced down at the sand. The male lizard-man was nowhere to be seen. Rorn was sitting down, rubbing his temples. The sand around him had a scattered pattern; exactly the one she would expect to see if the pistol the lizard woman was holding was the sonic impulse blaster it looked like.
“But paying attention is so hard,” Dakota whined. The setup for what Luna was about to do was so obvious, Luna had to cringe.
She stepped forward and drove her left fist into the green woman’s ribs. At the same time she moved her her half cape, putting the gun into shadow, just enough to form a tendril. She ripped the weapon from the lizard-alien’s hand with the great strength of her shadow tendrils, tossing it aside.
The lizard woman staggered back, catching herself on the terminal. She turned wide eyes on Luna, her face twisted in surprise and pain.
“Hi, Luna. You look great,” Dakota greeted her.
The older human couldn’t help but wince. It hadn’t been that long since Dakota was the one spying on her. “Can we please focus.”
In her moment of distraction, the lizard woman pushed a button on the cock-pit-looking console. “Bye,” she said, a smile in her voice.
A flash of roiling red light opened behind her. The distinctive swirling tunnel of an aetheric causeway stretched into the distance, and the lizard-woman slid down that hole.
Luna took a step to follow, but stopped herself. Jumping into a portal to an unknown destination was exactly how she’d gotten trapped in Faerie, and that was an experience she’d rather not repeat a third time. She could do nothing more than glare for the second it took the aetheric causeway to collapse.
“Do you have any idea how to operate this thing?” Luna asked. It was only then that she realized Pandora wasn’t behind her. Oh shit, had she stepped on one of the traps?
“I can try!” Dakota called out with entirely too much enthusiasm. “Rorn, can you give me a boost?”
“Yeah,” the minotaur grumbled. “Give me a second.” More quietly, he added, “I could have taken them both.”
Luna was scrambling around, looking for Pandora. She wasn’t in the opening of the cave. “Pandora?” She shouted.
There was no answer.
Luna pulled out her phone, but there was no service. She pulled out the communicator from her utility belt, tucked it around her ear, and hit the button to activate it.
There was no response. There must have been one of Aetherium Warmonger’s blackout boxes built into the terminal.
“Fuck,” Luna swore.
“Here I come,” Dakota said, snapping Luna’s attention back towards the painfully bright desert.
Her annoying younger teammate popped up, tossed by the minotaur, high enough to reach, but not clear, the railing on the platform in the mesa. “Uh-oh,” the young girl said as she teetered back towards a bad fall.
“What in darkness, Dakota?” Luna lunged, grabbing the younger girl’s shirt. Thankfully, the sun was positioned so there was enough shadow for Luna to secure herself to the ground by connecting her ankle to the surface with a shadow tendril. Dakota was rather heavier than her.
With a heave, Luna pulled her green-clad teammate over the barrier and onto the platform. “Thanks,” Dakota said. “I knew you’d help. Now let me see that terminal.”
Luna sighed. She did not have time for this. “Stay away from that. Pandora!” She plunged back into the cave, but saw no sign of her armor-clad teammate. She hit the buttons on the little Omni-communicator wrapped around her ear, but found nothing but deadly silence.
Then she heard something scarier. Dakota announced, “I think I got it.”
“Fuck,” Luna swore. Why did no one listen to her? The roiling red light of an aetheric causeway was just barely visible over the edge of the mesa’s balcony. Pandora would have to wait. Luna rushed back to the balcony’s railing. Please let that causeway not lead anywhere dangerous.
On the sands below them was a giant blue lobster. The thing towered over Rorn, putting it on a similar scale to a shipping container. It had raised its claws in warning to the minotaur, who was limping towards it. Because of course he was.
“Sweet! An abyss lobster!” With none of the seriousness the situation deserved, Dakota leaned in to whisper, “The Atlantians breed them as beasts of war.”
“I know what an abyss lobster is,” Luna snarled. The creature lunged forward, trying to crush Rorn in one monstrous claw. The minotaur managed to block the strike, turning the claw aside. It was an impressive display of strength and skill, but it didn’t stop the creature. A backswing slammed into the minotaur, sending him flying.
The lobster was already chasing Rorn before he’d even sprawled onto the sand.
“Hey!” Luna shouted as she jumped down to sand below. “Hey!”
Abyss lobsters were giant, but they were just animals. Maybe she could distract it long enough for Rorn to get to his feet.
Because if she couldn’t…
Chapter 6: Working Together
Pandora “Smith” moved as quickly as she dared as she made her way out of the cave. Her conversation with Tybid hadn’t taken that long, but Luna had been doing this cape thing for a long time. She might get suspicious. Still, she watched her step carefully. Tybid wasn’t the sort to pretend to request aid as a trick, at least not like this. However, he was absolutely the sort to set up traps that he couldn’t easily remotely disable. He’d helped her father deal with actual members of Galan’s military elite with technopathic cyberbrains in the past. A trap he could disable was one someone else could also disable. And as the god-damn claymore had indicated, he did not mess around.
She did start moving a little faster when the screaming started. She tried to signal with the Omnicomm in her ear, but her father’s blackout box was still in place. So maybe a bit of running through a death passage was required. If Moonless could do it, then Princess Aetherium could do it better.
She blinked against the harsh desert light as she stepped back out onto the balcony, and looked around. The situation wasn’t immediately dire. Tybid’s teammates, Gleex and Gexxa, were nowhere to be seen.
On the sand below was an enormous blue lobster towering over even Rorn. It didn’t look like anything the Aetherium Warmonger would deploy. The monster was torn between menacing a limping Rorn and snapping its claws at a sand-throwing Moonless. It was far too bright down there for the shadow-controlling cape to use her powers, and she was already moving slower and breathing heavily. Princess Aetherium could tell Rorn was in trouble because he wasn’t complaining about the help.
Up the balcony, Fletching was bouncing with excitement. She held her compound bow, but not in a manner that indicated she was about to use it. She had the stupidest grin on her face. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. I’m actually getting to see Moonless fight a real monster! Isn’t she amazing?”
Princess Aetherium felt her teeth grind. This was the fourth mission the fourteen year-old fangirl had gone on with the barely older cape, and they’d been training together for weeks. “Fletching, this is not the time.”
“I’ve always, always wanted to see her—”
“Die?” Princess Aetherium interrupted. “Because if we don’t help her, she might, Fletching.” The monstrous lobster below lunged at Moonless, who managed to dive aside in time.
“How am I supposed to help?” Fletching sounded more confused than upset or scared. This child.
“Ready one of your LED arrows and aim for the beast’s face, Fletching.” Princess Aetherium wasn’t sure why the girl was missing so many arrows, but she at least still had two of those.
“Uh, those arrows aren’t—”
“I can use it to blind the beast, Fletching.” Princess Aetherium tapped her temple. Below the lobster lunged at Rorn, who managed to dive and roll away from the thing. Thankfully, it didn’t seem smart enough to target his injured side.
“Oh, right. Technopathy. That’s a good idea.” She pulled the arrow and nocked it to her bow. But with the arrow pointing at the ground between her feet, she asked, “But then what?”
“Moonless,” Princess Aetherium shouted. “Get ready to get on that thing’s back and pull on its antennae. We want to give Son-of-Rore a shot at its underside.”
The goth cape waved a hand in acknowledgment, but could spare neither the breath nor attention to respond.
“Flash bang incoming, Son-of-Rore.”
“I’ll only need a moment,” the minotaur rumbled back. He sounded eager. That boy.
Princess Aetherium braced herself. The lobster was too large to lift with a tractor beam, not standing on the ground with the armor’s safety protocols in place. But she could still distract it.
She waited until the monster had turned its attention back to Rorn before calling out “Now!”
Her tractor beam—invisible in the bright desert sun—pulled Princess Aetherium hard into the platform’s railing. She could hear the metal straining. The lobster slowed, and lifted slightly, but it wasn’t enough to overcome its weight.
Moonless was next. Even slowed by her exertion, she was serpent-swift. She hoped off of one clawed arm to snag an antenna and pulled the creature back onto its haunches.
Slower than Princess Aetherium would have liked, Fletching loosed her LED arrow. It flew far closer than anyone would have liked to Moonless, but it was still close enough to the lobster’s eyes for the plan.
Princess Aetherium technopathically forced more power through the LEDs than they were designed for. They lit brightly and then burst. Nowhere near as bright an actual flashbang—not even as bright as the armored cape had intended—but bright enough. The lobster hissed, and waved wildly.
Its underside was exposed.
And then Rorn moved. His supernatural speed made up for his limp. His fist made audible crack, crack, crunch against the thing’s underside. On the fourth blow, he plunged his hand inside the creature. He threw an oversized handful of its oozing blue innards behind him. Tendrils of the stuff trailed behind it.
The gargantuan lobster shuddered once, and then collapsed. Moonless was able to throw her weight to keep the beast from falling directly on top of the limping minotaur.
“Oh wow!” Fletching smiled. “We make such a good team!”
Pandora and Luna both blinked at that. They met each other’s eyes before looking away.
So much for this stupid plan…
…
“You did what?” Pandora could not believe what she was hearing.
“I pushed this button, and then this button, and then this button.” Dakota pointed to a series of controls on the terminal. “I also turned these two dials a little. I’m not sure what these numbers mean, but they looked like they might be close Tranquility City.”
“The numbers looked like Tranquility City?” Pandora glanced at the extremely simple display. There were seven rows of numbers, each nearly two dozen digits long. Having been educated entirely in America, she had no idea how to map those seven-dimensional coordinates to points on earth. But she did know that even single-digit changes could send one far into the cosmos.
“Yeah.” Dakota showed no sign of understanding the gravity of her words.
“Did you consider that you could have easily opened up a causway to deeply xenophobic Galan, or worse, my father’s secret hideout, Lyon?”
“Oh that would have been so cool! I’d love to meet more of your people.”
Pandora audibly ground her teeth. “I haven’t set foot in Galan since I was three because they keep trying to kill me, Lyon.” Royal bastards were political complications none of the great houses wanted.
“Wait, really?” Dakota’s enthusiasm was barely blunted. “That’s just like Princess Hanako from—”
“This is my real life Lyon,” Pandora snapped. “Take it seriously before someone—possibly someone important like me—dies. Literally dies and goes to hell!” She shook her head. Luna had insisted the most junior member of the team had been like this constantly, but she’d been much better about keeping her head around Pandora in the past.
That finally seemed to have gotten through the freshman’s thick skull. “Oh… I’m sorry.”
“You should be, Lyon.” Pandora turned and considered the console. Other than the matrix of seven-segment displays showing the coordinates, there was nothing to indicate the state of the machine. Her father had shown her these specialized consoles before, on the rare occasions they actually managed to spend any time together. Understanding how they genuinely worked required a decade of physics education in topics even the broader galactic community hadn’t discovered yet. The best she could do with her primitive American education was load fixed presets to get to specific locations of importance. Her father had programmed a few such coordinates, each consisting of seven numbers that contained at least twenty digits, directly into her cybernetic brain. A supervillian needed to be careful when their subordinates wanted his daughter dead.
Pandora blinked at the display. As awesome as her cybernetic brain was, it couldn’t algorithmically compare the numbers her father gave her to the ones she was seeing with her cybernetics-free eyes. But scanning the one visibly and counting along the other mentally, they looked identical to one of those fixed presets. The first and last three digits of each number at least matched exactly. “I… I know where this goes?”
“Transaconic University, right?” Dakota was back to full cheer. “It looked University-y to me.”
“It’s Tranquility City harbor.”
“Oh, so close! I bet—”
She shut up as Princess Aetherium grabbed her shoulder. “Fletching. That lobster monster came from Tranquility City harbor.”
“Why would there be an Atlantian monster in—oh. Oh no. We’ve got to help!” The Atlantian’s peace with the surface world had been tumultuous for at least eighty years, and the ocean-dwellers were not happy about how the Justice Union had handled the fallout of the last kaiju attack.
An Atlantian monster in Tranquility City harbor might not be an accident.
“Rorn, Moonless,” Princess Aetherium shouted as she raised the slider to adjust how long the aetheric causeway would stay open. “Get ready to take a causeway home!”
“A what?” Rorn called up from below. While Dakota had been trying Pandora’s patience, he’d managed to pull off one of the abyssal lobster’s claws, and was resting it on one massive shoulder.
Princes Aetherium responded by entering the sequence of buttons to open the aetheric causeway. “Get in the portal, Rorn.”
Fletching let out an “Eep!” as Princess Aetherium swept the shorter girl off her feet. It was a bit of a struggle for her repulsor to shoot the two of them up and over the balcony’s railing. Dakota was heavier than she looked (and she wasn’t slim to begin with). The lobster’s body slid a bit along the sand as she used a repulsor on the corpse to slow their fall to the red sand below.
The distinctive roiling red glow of its opening was exactly where Princess Aetherium had thought it would be. Moonless and Rorn, the latter still carrying the lobster’s severed claw, were waiting for them just outside it. “Go, you fools,” Princess Aetherium called, letting Fletching drop to her feet.
She rushed towards the causeway, stopping only when she could no longer feel the hot desert air. Only Luna was next to her in the tunnel. She glanced back to find Rorn only a few moments behind, Fletching tucked under his arm.
She turned back towards the end of the causeway just in time to slide out into the overcast morning sky over Tranquility City. The air was cooler than in the red desert, but much more humid. She felt the rest of her team slide into place behind her.
The Tranquility City harbor was in a bit of disarray. A paramedic was frantically treating someone outside an ambulance, and there was some sort of hauling vehicle overturned, its mechanical underside in Princess Aetherium’s view.
The good news was, she didn’t see any further evidence of an Atlantian invasion. No aquatic soldiers or additional blue lobster-monsters or any of their nautical war machines. The bad news was the reporters. Besides the paramedic and the injured man they were treating, they were the only humans near where they’d emerged from the portal.
A news van and a camera crew, with a vaguely familiar woman holding a microphone. Overhead a chopper whirred away. Unless that was from the TCPD, the news had beaten the cops here.
The reporter, seeming only somewhat nervous, approached them. “Hello. Reena Cruz, Channel 9 News. Do you know what’s happening here?”
Fletching happened to be the closest to the press. The young girl took a half step forward and got as far as “Well,” before Princess Aetherium clamped an armored hand over her mouth.
“This is Princess Aetherium of the Justice Union.” It was important to remind people who might have last seen her on the news alongside her father that she was with the capes now. “We have just escaped the allies of the Aetherium Warmonger and need to debrief with the rest of the Justice Union before saying more. There is no cause for further alarm.”
From above a powerful woman’s voice boomed down, “Rest assured, the situation is under control.”
Princess Aetherium looked up to see Brick, the heaviest hitter on the Justice Union’s roster, hovering in the air. The younger cape knew that Brick cut an impressive figure, standing nearly as tall as Rorn, and stacked with muscle that probably would be impossible to maintain without her powers. Princess Aetherium couldn’t see much from her current angle, which was clearly optimized for the cameras’ position. She could tell the older cape was wearing her form-fitting brick-patterned body suit, and was doing that bold, fists-on-hips power pose that she loved.
“Brick is on the scene,” the reporter announced to the camera. “Brick, can you confirm that there are no further Atlantian forces moving on American soil?”
The massively muscled woman drifted lower, moving towards the Justice Union’s junior team.
“We and the US military are tracking the Atlantian navy and can confirm that there isn’t any mobilization. Our off-coast sensors have detected no mass movement of crustaceans. The abyssal lobster here was a one-off, and no more are likely forthcoming.” She set down gently between Moonless and Princess Aetherium. “And even if there were, the Justice Union is prepared to keep Tranquility City safe from such threats.”
“You’re welcome,” Rorn rumbled, tossing the massive claw towards the reporter. It landed on the concrete between them with a pronounced clack.
“Do you have any idea why Atlantian warbeasts are attacking US infrastructure?”
“It would inappropriate to speculate at this time,” the older heroine replied.
“What about the aetheric causeways opening in the harbor? Is this a sign that the Aetherium Warmonger is again considering conquest?”
“There is no immediate danger, Ms. Cruz,” Princess Aetherium replied, assuming a similar fists-on-hips pose to the senior hero. She did all she could to project confidence. Fletching, sufficiently reminded of how they were supposed to handle the news, mirrored her to the side. “But we must discuss what happened with the rest of the Union before making further statements.”
“They really do,” Brick added.
Chapter 7: Picking Up the Pieces
Pandora Smith ended up needing to do very little to steer the debriefing in the direction she wanted. For the most part.
“This started because you went to confront a peeping tom?” Brick was deeply unhappy with how they’d handled that initial shakedown.
Thankfully, this all went down in a conference room at the Justice Union’s headquarters, which meant Omnimind was also there, and the Indian super-scientist had always been Pandora’s biggest advocate among the senior Justice Union members. “Their actions would have been entirely appropriate, had the threat been the misbehaving teen it appeared to be.” After a bit more back and forth, Omnimind added “Do we not want and expect all of the Justice Union to stand up against wrongdoing whenever they see it?” which seemed to settle that matter.
When it came to Tybid, Gleex, and Gleex’s cousin Gexxa, Luna acted perfectly without prompting. “I thought we should pursue them. Like, we shouldn’t have just let them go like that.”
“Next time, I’ll just let you get blown up then, Hellsing!” Pandora snapped back.
“Better than having to keep working with you!” Luna was either genuinely furious or a far better actress than Pandora had expected of the goody two-shoes. Even if it was an act, the younger cape was channeling her emotions perfectly towards the goal of splitting it up—all without a hint of direction from Pandora.
It was a good thing the naked hatred flowed so freely between the two of them. Pandora did not want to imagine how much harder breaking up the team would be if they could get along.
“Girls!” Brick’s jaw had tightened a bit, but she was still outwardly projecting patience. “We can discuss the merits of staying and fighting in the dark versus strategic retreat later. Can we please review the events while the memories are still fresh?”
“I don’t know, Captain, can we?” Luna’s sneer was so perfect that Pandora wanted to punch it off her face.
A bit later in the briefing Pandora was also pleasantly surprised by Dakota. She was staggeringly unprofessional and excitable, particularly when it came to talking about the abyssal lobster (what a stupid name for a sea monster). Unlike Luna, who was lightly massaging the truth to make them look worse, Dakota was being her genuine self—an obsessive fangirl with no business fighting aliens or going on dangerous missions.
“Which-was-the-coolest-thing-ever-because-I-never-got-to-meet-real-aliens-before-unless-you-count-Azurian-which-I’m-not-sure-you-can-because-he’s-lived-on-earth-so-long-plus-he’s-not-green-and-we-all-know-what-his-species-is-like-and-“
Brick finally managed to get her to finally shut up with a clap that was louder than could be produced without super strength. “Dakota Lyon,” the bulky heroine’s voice was serious, but still managed to be short of mad, “this is not the quality of reporting I’ve come to expect from you based on—”
Dakota got the much larger woman to be quiet by holding out a legal pad. “I already finished my written report. I was just going to scan in into the textificator-thingie so we can put it all together. So, can I tell you more about how awesome Moonless is?”
“Please no,” Luna muttered.
Brick flipped through page after page of notes. “When did you find time to do all this?”
“You guys were arguing about the death trap for a while—Luna was totally right, by the way—so I got it out of the way. It’s like Omnimind always says, ‘It’s efficient’.’”
Omnimind looked up from the notebook computer she was coding on during the conversation to raise an eyebrow. “Is that something I say frequently?”
“No, not really, ma’am,” Pandora said.
Brick looked up from the pad at Luna. “Did you really go hand to hand with an abyssal lobster in an open field too brightly lit for your powers?”
Luna glanced at her team mates. “Well, yeah? What was I supposed to do, let Rorn fight the thing alone?”
Pandora wanted to say something snarky about that, but couldn’t bring herself to. Princess Aetherium would never leave another cape in danger like that. Instead, she settled for pointing out, “That’s exactly what Dakota did.”
“Well, yeah,” Dakota replied. “I can’t fight the way Moonless can. That lobster would have destroyed me.”
“The beast wouldn’t have stood a chance if I hadn’t injured my knee fighting that lizard,” Rorn grumbled.
“The point,” Brick continued, “is that it shows great skill and courage.” She glanced between the Scions of Shadows’ three female members. “And a level of solidarity I would like to see more of here.”
“Good luck with that.” Luna sulked in her chair.
“May I remind you that Hellsing and I are on this team under protest, Mrs…” Shit, what was Brick’s civilian last name?
Reading the legal pad over Brick’s shoulder, Omnimind said, “Yet, your results continue to impress. It seems the Professors’ Hellsing instinct was correct in this matter. We’ll have to consider what can be done to… reduce the interpersonal friction.”
“Good luck with that,” Luna repeated herself. That girl really knew how to get under Pandora’s skin.
Rorn broke the silence that followed, “So, uh, question. What was the deal with that lobster?”
The two adult members of the Justice Union exchanged glances. Omnimind spoke first. “Abyssal lobsters are war beasts bred by the Atlantian Empire under the ocean. Squads of the things were released into high density coastal areas in both of the last wars. Today’s incident, on its surface, seems completely different. There was only one, and we’ve uncovered no evidence of any sort of handler.”
“Do you think it’s like that time the trained orcas that got out and just started attacking random ships because that what they were trained to do?” Dakota asked. Rorn gave her a look that suggested he had no more clue of what she was talking about than Pandora did.
Brick glanced at Omnimind who said, “It’s possible. I see no rational reason a member of the Atlantian military would deliberately target the Justice Union’s home city out of the blue like this.”
“I thought you had detectors in place to prevent us from being surprised by this sort of thing?” Brick asked.
“I do,” Omnimind replied. She turned the notebook computer towards the larger cape. Pandora saw the graphs on the screen only through her technopathy. She didn’t understand what the graphs meant at all, though. The older cape made no effort to make it visible to the teens. “Some activity was detected, but below what I had calibrated as sea monster threat.”
“Does that mean you need to turn up the sensitivity?”
The Indian cape pursed her lips. “Unfortunately, I’m not sure I can. It generates excessive false positives as it is.”
“So the explanation is just, ‘sometimes giant monsters just wander into human cities’?” Rorn sounded incredulous. Turning to Dakota he added, “You said that didn’t happen here.”
“No, I said it just didn’t happen that often. Usually it’s not random.”
“Indeed,” Omnimind said. “We’ll have to wait for the Professors Hellsing to work their Atlantian contacts to see if there is anything more to be done.”
“How sure are you that Atlantian media implies another war isn’t brewing?” Brick asked.
“My methods are imprecise, and by this point some channels are certain to be compromised. But… there is no evidence to support intentional military build up. If this was deliberate, I hypothesize a lone radical actor. If it was deliberate.”
“So we’re just going to, what? Not worry about it?” Rorn didn’t sound like he liked that.
“Inaccurate,” Omnimind replied. “We’re going to continue to worry about it exactly as much as we have been. I spent weeks building and deploying those sensors, and hours each week monitoring them.”
“What about the aliens?” Dakota asked. She sounded like an excited child.
“That I’m less sure about.” Omnimind turned to Pandora. “How likely are they to attempt to force contact with you again?”
Pandora hated lying to Omnimind. So she said, “That strikes me as unlikely, ma’am. They were unprepared for the threat we presented, and forced to retreat quickly. Plus… assuming they were trying to reach my father, they may get what they wanted just by advertising they’re out there with missing aetheric causeway terminals. Aetherium Warmonger will want those back.”
Omnimind nodded. “And you’re sure there’s no way to contact your father that you’ve forgotten?”
“I told you there wasn’t, ma’am.” Pandora snapped. That wasn’t a lie; she was just accurately describing an earlier lie.
…
Pandora “Smith” waited until Wednesday before acting to fulfill her promise to Tybid. In that time, she’d confirmed that the computer receiving the stream from the hidden camera wasn’t actually saving the feed at all. The images from the locker room camera no longer existed (assuming Gexxa hadn’t done something too complicated for either her or Omnimind to discover).
Waiting until Wednesday to follow up with Tybid ensured that if her father did immediately do something in response, it would be plausible he could have come to a conclusion based on slow-traveling information. The former king of Galan was certainly going to be paying attention to news about his once beloved daughter who had betrayed him, and Tybid, Gleex, and Gexxa were known associates of his. Being suspicious of her would look paranoid.
Even so, she took additional precautions. She didn’t send the message from any of her devices, or any public devices she had access too. Instead, she took the train into the city on the pretext of visiting Omnimind to discuss how she should handle future situations like the camera in the locker room. Although perhaps pretext was the wrong word, as that situation had very much not gone as expected.
When the train stopped at the transfer station, just inside Tranquility City proper, she used her technopathy to find an idle phone. She couldn’t even see who was holding it, but they definitely weren’t on the train with her. Then she pulled up a private tab on their browser and directed it to a secret file server on the dark web—a server that only lieutenants of Aetherium Warmonger far more trusted than Tybid would even know existed. It was one of the things she hadn’t admitted to knowing about after she’d betrayed her father. It currently had no files—her father had deleted the few things the two of them had used this for in the past.
She streamed some data to the server. Pandora wasn’t tech-savy enough to know how any of this worked, but didn’t need to be thanks to her cybernetic implants. She did know that the encryption being used on the stream was something unique to Galan. No other computer, not even the ones belonging to whatever alien race her ancestors had plundered their technology from, would be able to covert it back to plain text. And even if they did, all they would find would be the text, Waiting for you at the seventh place—Tybid.
Pandora was quite sure her father would know the message wasn’t from Tybid, but even if Omnimind did manage to find the dark web file server and then reverse engineer Galan’s military-grade encryption (which was plausible for the super genius), the evidence wouldn’t immediately implicate Pandora.
She closed the private browsing tab and purged the last hour of network data from the phone for good measure. There may have been some data somewhere in the internet backbone and cell networks, but Pandora felt pretty good about this tip going unnoticed. She put the phone back into power saver mode with seconds to spare before her train pulled away.
“Not bad,” Pandora whispered to herself. “Not bad at all.” She returned her full attention to the romance novel she’d been reading on her own phone.
By the next stop something was bothering her, though. She couldn’t help but feel like she was overlooking something. She tried to set it aside—one consequence of being this good at operational security is that you can’t easily go back and check your work. If she had made a mistake, there was nothing she could do about it now, and so she went back to the excellent brooding that the novel’s male lead was doing.
But the feeling didn’t go away. She’d definitely missed something. By the next stop (four more to go), she’d given up on the brooding hunk and begun reviewing everything she’d done.
The plan was perfect. It would be basically impossible to trace the file back to her, or understand it if they did, or even point the finger to her if they did understand it. Tybid’s message would get to the Aetherium Warmonger, and then he could get them off this planet. There was no mistake.
Then it hit her. The blindingly obvious thing she’d overlooked.
Princess Aetherium was a hero, only concerned for the good of the people of this world. Aetherium Warmonger was a war-profiteering supervillain desperately trying to rebuild after betting everything on the wrong alien megalomaniac. He wasn’t going to help Tybid unless the mercenary did something for him. And being a soulless mercenary, there were a lot of dangerous, disastrous things Tybid would be willing to do for her father.
She wasn’t just rescuing a few less-than-innocent aliens. She was putting dangerous weapons into the hands of desperate supervillain.
How could she have overlooked this?
She dithered about what to do about it, but only for a moment. Princess Aetherium was a hero who always put the safety of innocent people first. That came before everything else. She would break her promise to Tybid.
At the next stop, she repeated her process: finding a phone off the train that wasn’t being used, bringing up a private browser window, and pointing it at the secret file server. She’d just delete the message and let Tybid continue to suffer on earth.
There was one file on the server. Pandora almost deleted it before she realized it had a different name than the one she’d streamed in only a handful of minutes ago. It couldn’t be.
She quickly checked the file contents, streaming it back through the layers of Galanish encryption in her cybernetic brain.
It was so short. Only three words.
I miss you.
A message from her father, a man she’d betrayed. A tyrant who did not forgive easily and never forgot. The man who’d given her armor and technopathic implants despite Galan’s laws barring such things from going to bastards. A hardened killer. Someone who’d sworn to protect her.
She was still staring at that message in her mind when the train started moving. She slammed the connection closed as fast as she could.
She kept turning it over and over in her thoughts as the train moved along. He said that he missed her. Not that he loved her, or wished to see her again—but also no swearing of vengeance or threats. Maybe he was just keeping with the cover? She’d pretended the message had come directly from Tybid for a reason.
Only two more stops until she’d be getting off the train. And going directly to the super genius who had done the most to advocate for Pandora’s admission to the club. Admission that had required her to swear she wasn’t helping her father in any way—even though she 100% was.
Pandora took a deep breath and did the only thing she could do. She put it all into a mental box for later.
Princess Aetherium opened her eyes. She had some genuine questions about how to handle serious but low-threat situations like she had encountered this past Saturday. There was going to be a lot of nuance, and she was excited to see what could be learned from the older heroine, and that was what she was here to do. Pandora could deal with all that messy stuff about their father on her own time.