“It doesn’t matter if there’s an edge, or if we occasionally cross it. As long
as the innocent are protected, our cause is just.” -Daniel Ketch,
Ghost Rider
Few could be said to understand the true mechanics of holding a complete conversation with Michael Pitch. The only known component of such an endeavor entailed preparing oneself for a lot of grunts and monosyllabic replies to any comment or question one posed to the man. This alone seemed universal. Other factors, however, seemed to affect how aggressive, passive, attentive, or dismissive the man was towards the other speaker.
Women of around his own age, for instance, often met with neutral grunts and a tone of voice which, in those few words he actually spoke, conveyed a quiet strength and surety of purpose that brooked no argument. Late-middle-age to elderly women always received at least a couple of words in response to whatever they had to say to him, never grunts or shifty looks. Young girls he would actually offer a smile that softened his entire frame and made Pitch look almost saintly and comforting to be around.
Males, however, were another story entirely with the exception of children. Children could always get a smile and friendly few words from Michael Pitch. If he had no time to talk, he would at the least offer a grin and wave before moving along. He was seldom in the presence of children, however, and so his way with them was not well known.
Men from the age of fifteen onward to the age of sixty or so got little out of the man, though, beyond a few guttural noises and curt single-syllable replies. The general exception to this were commanding officers, with whom he would exchange information, but not offer any personal input. In this regard, he was the perfect field officer.
And Pitch had now been a commander for HAC’s Sixth Elite Ground Forces for eight years. There had been missions he didn’t think he would survive. He’d seen more than one hundred of the world’s greatest soldiers beaten, blasted, and ripped apart by supervillains and their top cronies from all over the world. He had commanded these men and women, had served under a couple of them at one point, and considered himself a true comrade to all such troopers.
The closest he’d ever come to biting the big one was during an assault on a compound belonging to a villain known as Ratchet. A genius engineer, Ratchet utilized mechanized drones and androids, as well as his own personal cybernetic enhancements, to cause havoc in small suburban townships. As soon as a major response was sent in from state authorities, the engineer would reroute most of his forces to the nearest metropolitan area to rob every bank possible. That tactic had worked on numerous occasions.
HAC finally caught on, and sent Pitch and his unit to set a trap for the mad engineer. When they ambushed him, Ratchet got hold of Pitch with a piston-powered arm, breaking his elbow with a single squeeze. A vicious kick to the midsection sent the commander flying away, several ribs broken and his stomach ruptured. His saving grace had been the arrival of several anti-tech troopers in the unit, wielding rifles that emitted pulses of energy that could knock out Ratchet’s cybernetics.
Pitch, beaten though he was at the moment, had found in himself that secret reserve of strength that resides deep within all natural born killers. He tapped into it, hobbling over to the downed, semi-conscious villain, ramming the barrel of a combat shotgun into the man’s mouth, and pulling the trigger. Problem solved.
After that mission, Pitch had ensured that he was able to use that same solution a few more times. Super-powered or not, three more major threats to the nation and to the world had met their final good night at the commander’s hands. Never, however, did he claim credit for himself in his incident reports. Always he listed the cause of death as ‘Combat-related injuries, gunshot wound’. No matter how powerful a supervillain was, he had yet to meet one that could survive a blast in the mouth from a combat shotgun.
The odds always favored the shotgun.
An email he received in the early afternoon puzzled him, however. From the head of the committee himself, Erin Bantor, the email stated that Pitch should make himself ready to assemble a platoon to pursue Dr. Tyrant, in the event the old-timer decided to resume his criminal career. Dr. Tyrant didn’t fit the mold of villains Pitch would normally go after, though. For starters, he wasn’t super-powered in any way. Though a brilliant scientist, far more so even than Ratchet had been, Aberdeen Tyrannus had never taken his knowledge and utilized it to enhance himself physically. Secondly, the man had to be in his late seventies now, and surely couldn’t pose a real threat, could he?
A vicious, ruthless combatant, Michael Pitch was nobody’s fool. He spoke little, but observed much. Something about the idea of hunting down what had to now be a doddering old man did not appeal to him, particularly to his sense of honor. He respected the elderly, even if they had been criminals once. What was more, he knew far more about the check-in parolees than Bantor might think he did. Dr. Tyrant had indeed undertaken some enormously destructive enterprises and campaigns of terror, but after the supervillain passed the age of 45 or so, he toned down the brutality of his assaults, commanded his troops to avoid innocent civilian casualties. Pitch had even read once in a report that the Lashdrones, combat model drones that Tyrant used in the mid-80’s, had been programmed to shut down all weapon systems if a child were detected within a fifty yard radius, just beyond the maximum range of their flailing razor wires and chains.
In short, Dr. Tyrant hadn’t deserved a lethal response for a long time, and Pitch knew it. Bantor, apparently, didn’t know any such thing. The commander would do as he was ordered, and make preparations. However, if he received the order to track down the supervillain, he would have some hard questions for Erin Bantor.
Questions that might be asked with a weapon pointed at the Congressman.
Nine men sat around a long, polished cherry wood table that dominated the chamber they sat in, the air filled with swirling gray smoke from the cigarettes that seven of them chuffed away on. The imposing black double doors at one end of the room had stood open until a few minutes before, when the last of their number, Erin Bantor, came in with several manila folders tucked under his left arm. Each of the other eight members of the Hero Action Committee received a folder, seating themselves as Bantor pulled out his seat at the head of the table.
He remained standing, looking at the oversized clock on the left wall. In twenty minutes, they would be expecting a video call from one Aberdeen Tyrannus, a man whom all nine were familiar with in one way or another. The man most intimately acquainted with the mad scientist, however, sat in a drawing room on the other side of the building. He would not be called for until after the conference with Tyrannus.
Unbeknownst to Lester Collins, also known by all nine of these men as Captain Righteous, Michael Pitch was also in the building, waiting in the equipment load-out chambers beneath the building. Collins had seen the man when he first entered the HAC headquarters, a solid soldier with the walking-granite appearance of all hardened veterans. The squared haircut, the clean shaven face, and the worry and frown lines all spoke of a man with a tremendous amount of personal combat under his belt. Collins could respect that in a man.
Bantor eyed the clock again through the haze of smoke. He himself did not partake frequently, but found himself taking an offered cigarette from Senator Jim Farrin, the senior Senator from Michigan. Bantor nodded in thanks of the offered lighter, took a long drag, and sighed relief as blood rushed to his head. He took a remote control from the top of his own pile of papers, clicked a button, and the double doors thumped shut and locked. Another button press, and the left wall of the room slid open, revealing the conference room’s screen and cameras on either side of the display.
Nine o’clock approached with the slow expectation of a firing squad marching to the execution yard’s thick white line.
Aberdeen Tyrannus took another drink from his coffee mug, set it up for a refill, and adjusted his bow tie. He had gone to a little trouble having the communications kit moved down to his secret command chambers the previous evening. It hadn’t been a matter of moving too much on his own, but tinkering with an old servant drone to do the heavy lifting for him. That, in turn, had resulted in the old man having to redo the entire wiring arrangement for the monitor and camera, since the ancient servant drone had not quite understood his careful instructions about disconnecting all of the wiring before pulling the main units away from their cabinet enclosure.
Still, all things considered, he took pleasure in knowing that he still retained the nimble fingers needed to make fine adjustments to wires and devices of all sorts. If he hadn’t taken care of himself over the years, he might have found himself in much worse straits at this point. Abe looked at the control panel behind him. In three minutes, the HAC high command would be expecting him to call.
“Let’s make sure they’re on their toes,” he said to no one, opening a panel on the left armrest of his mobile command chair and flicking a switch. The monitor flickered to life, revealing a flat blue screen, and a red LED light indicated that his camera was on. With one last press of a button, he sent off the signal that would open contact between himself and the members of the Hero Action Committee.
He hoped that they would listen.
Bantor almost choked on smoke, caught off-guard as he was by the sudden appearance of Aberdeen Tyrannus on the video monitor. The aging villain not only initiated contact four minutes early, he also appeared in a getup that almost made Bantor laugh out loud. He stubbed out his cigarette quickly and moved around the table so that he stood directly opposite the camera. If he didn’t, he would be just outside of the camera lens’s view, and thus out of Tyrannus’s view.
“They’re a nasty habit, son,” Tyrannus said, shaking his head. “You want to live as long as I have, you’d be best served just quitting those altogether.”
“I assume you didn’t want to have a public service announcement about the dangers of tobacco use,” grumbled General Farat. The general was a soft-bellied, iron haired man dressed in his full dress regalia, with more medals and pins adorning his uniform than any soldier Bantor had ever seen. Seated now on Bantor’s left, the general stubbed out his own cigarette and cleared his throat. “You wanted this conference, Tyrannus, and you’ve got it. What’s your story?”
“Gentlemen,” Abe said after clearing his throat, “what you see behind me is a complex computer system, or rather, the primary monitor for that system. I am going to press a few keys, which will first run a lot of numbers, graphs, and lines in front of you that I presume few if any of you will understand. For your benefit, I’ve used the data you’re going to see, and then run in through a visual simulation program to let you see just why I’ve decided to contact you.”
Abe rolled himself most of the way out of the camera’s view, pushed a button on his motorized chair, and the monitor flickered to life. Just as he had predicted, he saw the initial data run with no effect on the main body of the Hero Action Committee. When the visual simulation ran through its entirety, a full fifteen minutes accompanied with narration in the doctor’s own voice, what he saw was flat disbelief.
This, he thought, is where the real butting of heads comes. “You can’t be serious,” General Farat groused aloud. “I’m not about to buy into this nonsense. The whole issue of global warming has been debated for well over a decade, and there’s a reason that fewer and fewer people are buying into it. That reason is that it’s a bunch of liberal nonsense.”
A couple of the other committee members grunted and nodded. Abe adjusted his glasses, shook his head. “Look, I know you gentlemen all have vested interests, financially speaking, in keeping up the denial. But this system is not wrong. I’ve run the numbers with several variations, and every result is the same. If something isn’t done, the ice caps will melt and the world will be done in by a series of enormous floods in five to eight years. The point of no return is in thirty months’ time.”
Though several members scoffed aloud, Bantor held up a hand at waist height to stay any further outbursts. He cracked his neck to one side, then straightened out his blazer. “Doctor Tyrannus, if I may ask a question?”
“Of course, congressman. I always welcome questions. As an academic, it’s a great pleasure of mine to partake of ‘Q and A’ sessions.” Tyrannus folded his hands in his lap.
“Let’s just say for the sake of argument that what you’ve shown us is true. Given that, what is it you expect us to be able to do about it?”
“Ah, the heart of the matter,” said Abe, clapping his hands and turning away from the camera for a moment. He tapped away at his command console, and after half a minute, a green-and-black wire diagram popped up on the screen, rotating slowly. “This, gentlemen,” said Abe, swiveling back around towards the camera, “is a copy of the original diagram for my Freeze Ray. It was confiscated during my capture at the hands of Captain Righteous, and turned over to the Department of Defense. I believe you might remember it personally, general. During that particular period of my career, you were just a lieutenant-colonel. The stars look good on you, by the way.”
“Fuck you, you psychotic little cretin,” the aged military lifer snarled at the screen.
“What I propose is this, gentlemen; you allow me to retrieve the Freeze Ray, and get me to the ice caps, with assistance from your military, of course. There, I utilize the device to reconstruct the ice caps, turn it back over to you when the work is done, and then everybody gets to go about their merry lives.”
Silence met Abe’s diatribe, but a silence filled with glances between each pairing of members of the Hero Action Committee. Bantor planted his hands on his hips and faced the camera. “Dr. Tyrannus, we’re going to disconnect the call and be back with you in ten minutes. Can you do that?”
“I’m patient, but remember, those ice caps aren’t,” said the aged scientist. The screen went blank as Bantor pushed a button on his own remote, and Abe let out a heavy sigh. He’d seen the sort of expression that Bantor had been wearing a thousand times before. That expression said, plain and simple, that Bantor would not buy into the science. A man of God, Bantor would fight tooth and nail to deny most forms of scientific evidence if they went against his precious biblical teachings. Additionally, the man was a through-and-through conservative, and any endeavor that might prove that his political party had been wrong all along would be shot down from the word ‘go’.
He had to hope the other members of the committee weren’t as stupid.
“Gentlemen, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I think this is just a ruse by the doctor to try and make one more attempt at causing chaos. You all know that this global warming hokum is just that, hokum. By God, I will not stand by and have this very organization bamboozled into helping a supervillain!” He slapped his hands on the table as he fairly shouted the last word for emphasis.
“Normally I’d be right behind you there, Erin,” said Senator Wolfe, a junior senator from California. The youngest member of the committee, he had been brought on board ostensibly to help bring balance to the organization’s power structure. In truth, he’d been invited as a token liberal, to try and avoid HAC coming under too much scrutiny. “But Tyrannus is a well-respected scientific mind, one of the most brilliant minds this country has ever produced. He never made miscalculations, ever. We were merely able to always find a way to tamper with those calculations, and thus foil his plans. For a villain, he wasn’t very violent in the last quarter of his career, either. I doubt he would suddenly want to do anything hostile.”
Muttering from four of the other five members of the committee. Farat had already made his decision, and nobody was surprised by that. The general wouldn’t be caught dead letting someone like Tyrannus have that bit of technology back in his hands. Likewise, the general simply didn’t want to believe the science. After all, a world-wide catastrophe like this would spell the end of the military-industrial complex, and we can’t have that, no, no. Bantor, however, worried that Wolfe might be able to sway the others.
If he was allowed to hold the floor.
“Aberdeen Tyrannus was one of the most difficult villains for us to contend with,” Bantor said. “He escaped detention and went back to campaigns of global terrorism over a dozen times through the years. He was always clever, crafty. I don’t doubt for a second that this is just a plot to get directly at our organization. A long-standing antagonism against us would make him want to do whatever he could to get vengeance against us. At his age, he doesn’t have long left to try, if I were to guess.”
Incredibly, Wolfe’s eyes widened as the younger man bought into Bantor’s spiel, hook, line and sinker. With the most evident obstacle out of the way, Bantor nodded, and took up the remote control again. He clicked a button, and once again the screen flickered to life, showing Aberdeen Tyrannus in his motorized seat, a small cup of coffee in his hands.
“Ah, you’re back,” Abe said, setting the cup aside. “What have you decided?”
“We’ve decided that we’re not going to fall for your deceptions, Tyrannus.” Hands planted on his hips, Bantor stuck out his scrawny chest in his best ‘champion of freedom and justice’ pose, a sneer carving its way onto his face. “We all know the whole global warming thing was a scam, a whole lot of liberal paranoia and lies perpetrated to try and score political points.”
“You don’t understand,” Abe said, trying to break into what he could tell was going to be a brief but horribly self-righteous speech. Before he could continue, however, Bantor carried on.
“All I need to understand, along with the rest of the members of the Hero Action Committee, is that you, Dr. Tyrant, are once again attempting to become an active supervillain in the world. We will stand against whatever forces you send, and your schemes will be defeated.”
“Look, I’m not trying to pull anything funny, here,” Abe snapped, his patience at its end. “Just give me back the Freeze Ray for a little while, let me fix things, and I’ll hand it back over right away.”
“You will get nothing of the sort from us, Dr. Tyrant.”
“I can build another one, you know,” he said, perhaps too quickly. Damn, he thought, seeing the knowing smirk on General Farat’s face. The Army lifer’s eyes, though viewing the world through the gauze of distant, high military command, had lost nothing of their capacity for sharp perception. Nor had his ears; the man knew that Abe was bluffing. The general tugged on Bantor’s sleeve, whispered in the congressman’s ear, and pulled out a fresh cigarette.
“You can’t, and we know that,” Bantor said flatly. “What you’re showing us up there is a primary design for the Freeze Ray. The final design schematics, along with the broken device itself, were confiscated when Captain Righteous apprehended you during that particular campaign. We know that you can’t finish a new device without the power core from the first one, given its unique nature. We have possession of the rest of the material from the comet that allowed your Freeze Ray to function.”
Abe fell silent, unable to form a retort. For once, Bantor really had him by the balls in this conversation, because the congressman spoke true. Prior to his construction of the Freeze Ray, an unannounced comet had crashed into the Pacific Ocean in several splintered fragments. Abe had managed to send drones to collect a small amount of the material as the Navy went about doing their own operation. Because of the heavy presence of assault submarines, Abe had sent only three of the stealth units, and two of them had been spotted and destroyed.
The third drone had brought him back only a couple of pounds of the comet material. Analysis and experimentation yielded a functional power core for the Freeze Ray, though Abe had to admit that most of the properties of the material remained a mystery to him. What he knew, he used, and to great effect.
Until Righteous had come for him.
Bantor knew about this flaw in the doctor’s plans. He quite literally needed the help of HAC in order to make any kind of effort to save the ice caps, and thus, most life on the planet. If they wouldn’t work with him, he would have to devise a plot to find where the DoD was holding the Freeze Ray, and then steal it back from them. At seventy-eight years of age, the former supervillain worried for a moment that he might not be able to pull it off.
Then he remembered that he had Rogers working away in his secret facility, bringing everything back up to running order, making sure the drones and assault vehicles would function properly once they were brought back online. There were other measures to be attended to, steps to be taken, and the first of them would need to be started the moment this conversation with the HAC command finished.
“Okay, you have the right of it there,” Abe admitted, feeling deflated and letting it show. “However, that doesn’t change the fact that what I’ve shown you is the truth. There will be catastrophe on a scale to decimate everything we know. And frankly, son, you’re not going to stop me from trying to find a solution.”
“Does trying to get the Freeze Ray back from us fall under that purview,” Bantor asked. Abe remained silent for a moment, rubbing his temples with his hands and crouching forward for a moment. He let himself sag, showing the committee his surrender. Then he sat up sharply, and signaled to his drone to come to his side. The bipedal worker drone stomped forward, turning to fact the camera. An audible gasp escaped the throat of everyone in the HAC command room, with the exception of the congressman.
“It does, and believe me, I have plenty more of these,” Abe said, hooking a thumb at the drone. “Unit, crush it,” he commanded sternly, pointing at the camera. The machine took two steps towards the communications setup, and then the HAC committee saw one steel arm, rods, wires and plates linked together in a near-perfect mimicry of a skeletal human appendage, rising up and curling its hand into a fist. It then swung down in the blink of an eye, and the monitor screen flickered and rattled as the camera on Aberdeen Tyrannus’s end was destroyed.
Silence filled the chamber. Bantor slowly strode back to his seat at the head of the table, taking an offered cigarette from Wolfe as he walked behind the senator. He leaned down, let Wolfe light it for him, and finished walking back to his seat. He sat down, blowing out a plume of smoke and staring straight ahead, his eyes fixed on nothing.
When finally he spoke, his words came out hushed, raspy. “Gentlemen, it would appear that Dr. Tyrant is reactivating. I thought that this might happen. I have Michael Pitch on standby in the equipment chambers below. I’ve also invited someone else here, and I’d like him to come in and speak with him now.” He pushed several buttons on his remote. The monitor wall closed, the lights came back on, and the double doors unlocked. One of them cracked open a foot or so, and an aide poked his head in. “Get him,” Bantor said. The aide nodded and disappeared again. He returned a few minutes later, holding the door open for a tall, powerful-looking man in his late sixties, dressed in a plain white button shirt and black khakis, polished wingtip shoes on his feet.
“Gentlemen,” the man said, the low tenor of his voice rumbling slightly. “You may not recognize me without the armor suit. I’m Lester Collins. You may know me as Captain Righteous.” Every member of the committee stood up and saluted, even General Farat. Collins grinned and nodded at them all, then walked over to where the monitor had been. He stood at military parade rest, hands folded behind his back, his feet shoulder-width apart, knees slightly bent. “Your meeting with Dr. Tyrannus is over, I presume?”
“That’s right,” said the general. “It didn’t exactly go so well. Now, Congressman Bantor says he has one of my favorite operatives on hand, but I’ve got to be honest here,” the general said, looking directly at Bantor. “I don’t think he’s going to be necessary.”
“What?” Bantor stared wide-eyed at him.
“Do you really think we need an elite strike force for one doddering old scientist? I think if we send the Captain here, he can reason with Tyrannus. They’ve had plenty of experience dealing with each other.” Before Bantor could retort, Lester Collins spoke up again.
“I’m inclined to agree with the general on this, sir,” he said to the congressman. “Give me a week’s time to locate him and have a discussion. I’m sure Tyrannus wouldn’t try anything rash, especially if I get the opportunity to find out what it is he wants.” Bantor looked around at the other members of the committee, and he didn’t like what he saw in their assembled faces. They all seemed inclined to side with the general and Collins on this one.
“Very well,” said Bantor, stubbing out his cigarette. “We’ll furnish you with his last known location, and expect that you’ll report in when you have developments. Is that amenable to you, Captain Righteous?”
“It is, sir. I can just get a contact number from you, and call to check in when I’ve made any kind of progress.”
“You have a cellular,” the general asked with a smirk. “Christ, am I the only one here who doesn’t want to have one of those things?”
“I may be old, sir, but I understand the need for me to have one,” said Collins.
“That’s good,” said Bantor. “Agent Styles in the front office can furnish you with the information you’ll need to start off. The best of luck to you, Captain Righteous.” Collins nodded shortly, and exited the room without further conversation. A couple of minutes passed before the general rose from his seat with a grunt.
“Bantor, I want to be kept abreast of events with Righteous. If something should go wrong, I want to be able to reach Agent Pitch immediately,” the general said. “Can you give me that much?”
“I can indeed,” said Bantor. “Gentlemen, I believe we’re done here, for the time being. If we should need to convene again, I trust you’ll all be available?” Nods and muttered agreement, and then the conference room swiftly emptied, leaving Bantor alone with the four walls. His blood ran hot in his veins, fury rising at having lost control of the discussion with the committee. He was in charge of the group, wasn’t he? How, then, did the conversation get away from him? How did Captain Righteous leave the building without Michael Pitch and a team of commandos at his back?
How did Erin Bantor fail at guaranteeing the end of Dr. Tyrant?