“I think you and I are destined to do this forever.”
-The Joker, The Dark Knight
The data uploaded onto Lester Collins’s GPS system as he’d been leaving HAC headquarters caused the superhero to do a double take. According to the data, when he cross-referenced it against some of his old maps and schematics, all preserved on a computer he kept in his humble home in Baltimore, there was now a small suburban neighborhood built on top of what he had known to be a hidden laboratory belonging to Aberdeen Tyrannus. He had never reported this facility to the Department of Defense or the Hero Action Committee, as at the time of his discovery of it, Tyrannus had been imprisoned.
And he’d simply forgotten about it the next time he had to go out to apprehend the supervillain.
According to the data from HAC, an entire neighborhood had been built up over top of the facility. Nobody had known what the facility was to begin with, and like many such supervillain complexes, most of which had been destroyed in large part by military forces, it had been buried and forgotten about. At least, by most folks, and Lester Collins was hardly most folks.
The data, combined with his old maps, told him everything he needed to know. Aberdeen Tyrannus had a hidden facility, probably in the process of being prepared for operation, and the home he’d purchased after being released into the check-in parolee program sat almost directly on top of it. Collins read through the most recently updated files on Tyrannus, and there was no mention of an inspection of his home being done since his purchase of the property.
In other words, the folks at HAC had become complacent. They must have believed that in his advanced years, the former supervillain would cause no trouble. Though he hadn’t himself wanted to believe that Tyrannus could be up to anything sinister, the presence of that laboratory spoke too clearly. He might actually have to contend with Dr. Tyrant one final time. As Lester walked down to his own basement, he found himself shaking his head at the prospect.
While he had lost some of his edge, he doubted very much that Aberdeen Tyrannus would be faced with the same dilemma. The mad scientist relied on henchmen and machines to do his bidding, and such things didn’t lose their edge. Machines received updates, maintenance, repairs. Henchmen were ageless, always more of them joining the ranks of the supervillain brotherhood, serving whoever could pay top dollar for their services, or offer the most unique opportunities if they lined up with their own personal schemes and outlooks of the world.
In short, Captain Righteous might finally be defeated by his arch nemesis.
In the basement, Lester flipped on a light switch at the bottom of the creaking wooden steps, illuminating what looked at first glance to be a personal bar and billiards room. Reaching to the side of the light switch, however, he pressed a button, and the pool table dominating the center of the room flipped over on hidden rollers, revealing a glass-encased suit. Sleek and shimmery, it was one of his old uniforms, a combat suit designed specifically for his use by engineers at the Department of Defense.
The metal used in the suit’s construction had been retrieved from the same comet that had given Tyrannus the power core for his Freeze Ray. Composed of thousands of small, interlocking diamond-shaped plates, the suit still fit Collins, who had donned it for a charity event only a couple of months prior. The smooth head piece sat on top of the suit, which stretched like fabric, but could stop armor-piercing bullets without taking any visible damage. A flame-retardant chemical was sprayed on the suit when he pressed an orange button on the left side of the glass case, and he allowed the substance to finish quick-drying on the armor before opening the case with the press of a lever.
After putting the suit and cowl on, Collins looked at himself in the floor-length mirror next to the bar. He looked like a sculpted athlete dipped in liquid metal, a large ‘R’ stenciled in gold into the chest of the suit. He personally thought he looked ridiculous, though the suit seemed to be the most popular armor he had, if the sales of his action figures was any indication.
The next step for Collins was fetching his equipment belt and bandolier, both of which were tucked away in hidden compartments behind the bar itself. He took a moment to have a shot of Johnny Walker Red before clipping them on, and he smiled to himself. “That’d make one hell of a PSA, now wouldn’t it? ‘Hey kids, I’m Captain Righteous! Don’t drink and drive, but if you’re going to, make sure it’s with a fine Johnny Walker product!’ Yeah, right,” he grumbled.
He decided he was just getting too old for this shit.
No sooner had the drone destroyed the camera than Abe had it repairing the device. He’d only done that out of a sense of theatrical necessity. As soon as he could tell that the drone was capable of handling its assigned task, he scrambled through his database for contact information. He needed to find a way of getting in touch with George Farris.
Farris had once been a supervillain in his own right, a man feared across all of Europe and in parts of the former Soviet Union and northern Africa. Known as Lord Claw, he, like Abe, had no superhuman powers or abilities. What he did have, however, was an intense devotion to the study and practice of the assassin arts of the ninja, and a host of hundreds of similarly talented henchmen.
Known as the Brotherhood of the Dark Claw, Farris’s organization had been among the most elite villain groups in the world. Focused on high-class thefts, burglaries, and heists, Farris had been merciless in his accumulation of wealth and influence in various underworlds across the globe. For eight years, it seemed as though nobody could touch Lord Claw.
Because of his prowess, Tyrannus had contracted with Claw’s outfit on numerous occasions, utilizing their particular skill set to steal technology and components that he had no access to on his own. Working together, Farris and Tyrannus had become friends, spending time together outside of their separate criminal enterprises ultimately. They enjoyed many of the same sorts of films and sporting events, and both were avid bowlers.
At one point, however, they’d simply lost touch. Abe didn’t see or hear from Lord Claw, except to discover that the supervillain had finally been apprehended in 1976. Abe never found out who’d finally nabbed the master ninja, but what he knew shocked him; someone had broken Lord Claw’s spine, paralyzing him from the waist down. After he was finally released by HAC authorities in 1983, he immediately set to work on a new organization, one that, again, Abe had utilized several times.
George Farris formed the International Henchmen’s Union.
Abe could still remember first meeting up with Farris at his American headquarters for the IHU, seeing a man who had become his closest friend and ally brought low. For most of his adult life, Farris had been a master of ninjitsu, an agile and deadly force to be reckoned with. He had looked unnatural, alien almost, bound to a wheelchair. Still, they had reaffirmed their friendship quickly, though they hadn’t spoken now in six or seven years.
Abe located Farris’s last known contact number, and brought up a telephone application on his control console. He flicked on a microphone in the console and dialed the number, letting it ring while he worried about how quickly HAC could dispatch a strike team. After three rings, there was a distinctive click, and then a voice coming through.
“This is Farris,” said the former Lord Claw. His voice sounded dry, cracked, and a hint of impatience ran through it.
“George, it’s Abe, and I’m in some trouble,” said Tyrannus quickly. “I think I may have HAC people coming, and soon.”
“Dear gods, man, you know you should always get in touch with me weeks before you’re planning to do something public,” Farris almost shouted over the phone. “How long do you think you have?”
“Maybe a day or two, considering my location,” Abe said. “This is a residential area, they’ll need time to evacuate everybody around me without causing a ruckus. They’ll try to do it at night, make sure I don’t see anything amiss.”
“Well, what sort of job are you trying to pull off, Abe? Especially at your age?” Abe could hear the grin in Farris’s tone, as Lord Claw was four years his senior.
“That’s the real hell of it all, George. I’m not trying to pull any kind of job,” Abe said. He tapped away at his console, activating security cameras and unseen defense grids on his property. “I’m not trying to take over the world; I’m trying to save it.” He then launched into a diatribe about the simulations he’d run on his system, the inevitable floods that would be coming, and the fact that despite his demonstration to the Hero Action Committee, they flatly refused to believe him. “They think I’m trying to pull a fast one,” he finished.
“To tell you the truth, if I didn’t know for certain that you wouldn’t make something like that up, I’d be hard pressed to believe you too,” Farris said with a sigh. “But I know you, Abe. I know you wouldn’t drum up something false in the realm of science for just one last scam. I can send a small unit to you in an hour. It won’t be much, just a skeleton crew. You want any combat heavies in the mix?”
“Yes, of course,” Abe said. “Non-lethal weapons if they’re available.”
“They always are, my friend. I know you’re not big on unnecessary casualties. Just give me your location.” Abe rattled off the address and directions from the nearest airport, and clicked off with Farris. Henchmen would be good to have, but he knew that Farris wouldn’t be able to send enough manpower to meet his likely needs. He needed to get more drones running and online.
Abe wasted no time, heading for the teleporter that would take him to the compound and his friend, Calvin Rogers. Rogers would be unprepared for the sudden increase in expected workload, but Abe’s confidence in the engineer wavered not for a moment. His only worry now was keeping Rogers on the property too long. As soon as midnight came, if the man agreed to work hard and through the afternoon and evening, Abe would send him on his way.
Just because he might himself be meeting his demise at the hands of HAC elite troops in the next seventy-two hours, he saw no reason to let the technician suffer the same fate.
There was nothing to be done for it, he decided. The sun had only just poked up over the horizon, and already there were HAC operatives evacuating houses in a ten-mile radius from Tyrannus’s house. Somehow, Bantor had green-lit the use of additional forces even after the HAC committee had dispersed, and Captain Righteous, wearing his armored suit under a blue button shirt and loose gray slacks. It made him a little uncomfortable, but he didn’t want to just show up in front of Aberdeen Tyrannus with a handful of presumptions.
He pulled to the curb in front of a house three doors down from Tyrannus’s property, putting the Ranger in park and hopping out. He looked up and down the street, seeing nothing out of sorts. Collins might have breathed a sigh of relief, but he spotted something along the side of Tyrannus’s property that made him wince.
Standing in the shadow of the side of the house, between the outer wall and the fence of the adjoining property, he could just make out a multi-barreled defense turret. It seemed Dr. Tyrant was expecting company already. “The man wastes no time,” he muttered to himself. The untrained eye might have seen the device and assumed it to be some sort of security camera, but Collins’s enhanced sense of vision allowed him to see the fine details with a moment’s concentration. The gears and barrels were recently oiled, gleaming even in the shadows of the gutter’s overhang.
He walked to within a dozen paces of the property’s border, eyes scouring the front lawn and cement walkway leading up to the front door. His ears picked up a barely detectable hum, coming from under the sidewalk itself. Machinery in the now-underground facility roaring to life, and God alone knew what kind of technology Dr. Tyrant had at work down there.
Perhaps he’d been wrong to assume that the old villain posed no threat anymore. Speeding up his pace, Lester Collins tromped to the point where the sidewalk turned right to the pathway up to the former supervillain’s front door. He looked at the lawn, making note of the barely visible black rings covered in dirt and grass dotting the ground. A defensive perimeter around the property, probably tied into the turrets and who knew what other sort of weaponry tucked away around the house. He had to proceed with extreme caution.
Or so he would have thought, but that suspicion took a solid blow to the side when Aberdeen Tyrannus swung the door open into his house. The old scientist lowered himself onto the top step, a mug of coffee in his left hand, his clean white lab coat draped over him like a robe. He adjusted his thick, heavy glasses with his free hand, and lifted the coffee slightly in a greeting.
“Come along inside, Captain Righteous. There’s coffee, if you’re up for a cup at this fine early hour.” Collins grinned, shook his head in disbelief. He looked at Aberdeen Tyrannus, planted his hands on his hips, and then took a cautious step forward. When nothing happened, he looked around, realizing that the low humming could no longer be heard. The little laser-grid projectors had popped back down into the lawn as well.
“I’ll take a cup, doctor. And please, it’s Lester.” He stopped before the shorter, older man, and extended a hand, which Dr. Tyrant took firmly and shook.
“Abe. Come along.”
Abe first spotted Captain Righteous when he passed through the perimeter that HAC had already established in the middle of the night, only an hour after Calvin had made his swift exit from the underground compound and then the property itself. That sighting he owed to the engineer, as Calvin had smartly suggested that he be allowed to get the reconnaissance drones up and running above everything else when Abe told him about the tight timeline.
Rogers’s foresight quite possibly saved both Abe and Collins an unwanted fight. Silent aerial drones had relayed imagery of HAC agents establishing a perimeter about ten miles out from Tyrannus’s home, and when a government-issued vehicle came through that invisible barricade, Abe had commanded one of the drones to swoop in for a closer look. Even without the cowl that used to cover three-quarters of his face, Captain Righteous’s face could not be mistaken by the elderly super-scientist.
Righteous, whose real name Abe knew to be Lester Collins, had barely appeared to have aged since the last time he’d seen the superhero. Sure, his hair had gone iron gray, and worry and frown lines creased his eyes and the corners of his mouth in a way that would look right on a man in his late forties or early fifties, but otherwise, the man still exuded strength, power. He also appeared far calmer than Abe would have expected him to be.
Maybe he just wants to talk, Abe thought, looking at his monitors, tied to the aerial drones and security perimeter cameras on his property. The easy, relaxed posture of the man made this idea more credible to Tyrannus, who decided to greet the man personally. He grabbed a fresh cup of coffee, and headed up from the basement to his living room. There, he used a command panel in the wall next to the front door to deactivate the defense sensors and weapons, and opened the door.
Seeing Collins standing there, he could tell the man was a little on edge. He noticed Collins’s eyes rove over the lawn, knew that the superhero had taken note of the disappearance of the sensors. After shaking hands and inviting him in, Abe took one step to the side of the door. As Collins stepped inside, he closed the front door and reactivated the defense systems. “Please, the kitchen’s in through that doorway. Go on ahead, Lester.”
Collins appeared to be taking in the arrangements of the living room, which, though minimal, spoke of a man with finer tastes. “You seem to be doing well for yourself, Abe.”
“Some of this I already had, most of it I bought after buying the house,” Abe said, ushering Collins through the archway into the black-and-white, domino-themed kitchen. “I was given access to my financial resources after my release.”
“Those assets HAC had managed to find, you mean,” Collins said with a wry grin, taking a seat at the small, two-person table in the middle of the kitchen. Abe snickered and poured Collins a cup of coffee from a Keurig coffeemaker, setting a clean black mug with two white dots on it in front of the superhero. As he leaned down to serve his guest, Abe caught a glint of the metal armor suit under the white button shirt.
“They thought you might need to take the traditional approach with me, I presume,” Abe said, taking creamer and sugar out of the cupboard and fridge and bringing them to the table. He eased himself into the seat across from Collins, who stirred his coffee, brilliant blue eyes locked on Abe.
“Why would you think that, Abe?” A sip of the coffee, eyes still locked on the scientist over the rim of his mug.
“Because you’ve got your armor on,” Abe said calmly. He shrugged his shoulders, took his own sip. “Can’t blame you, Lester. You couldn’t know, and seeing my systems online probably made you question my motives even further. Did you notice the aerial drones while you were driving along?” A shake of the head from Collins. “That’s good news for me, bad news for anybody wanting to come along and do me some unwelcome harm.”
“I’m hoping that we can talk things over in their entirety, Abe,” Collins said, finishing his coffee swiftly. “I wasn’t made privy to all of the details of your conversation with Representative Bantor and the rest of the HAC council, but I’m guessing it didn’t go over so well.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” Abe replied, rolling his eyes behind his thick glasses. He rose from his seat and motioned with a hand that Collins should follow him. Into the hallway, down the steps into the basement, and then the hidden stairwell down to his command room under the house, the teleporter chamber to their left as they swept into the room. “As you can see, I’ve made a few modifications to the house since moving in,” Abe said, gesturing wildly at everything around them. “The only one that I really need to show you right now is this one, though.”
Abe stood before his primary command console, easing himself into his automated rolling chair as it puttered up to him, activated by a sensor trip laser at the bottom of the staircase. The timing seemed perfect, Collins thought, to make use of this rare, uncontested access to Dr. Tyrant’s primary command structure. “Is that you central command console?”
“Yes, though, only for the house. Mind you, there’s a completely revamped console in the headquarters even further underground, but in order to get there, we’d have to use the teleporter, which is in fact controlled from this console. So, in essence, yes, it could be done,” Abe said. Collins raised an eyebrow at him.
“What could be done, precisely?”
“You could, if you took it into your head to do so, completely eradicate any chance at all that I’m pulling some sort of strange double-cross or mischief by simply wrecking this console,” Abe said, holding his arms and hands out to display the central keyboard of the command console in a fashion similar to the women who showed off prizes on ‘The Price Is Right’. “Of course, if you did that, I’d have to forevermore curse you for the dimwitted nudnik that you are, and forever would only be a few years anyhow, so far as the human race would then be concerned, because without me, sunshine, that’s how long our species has left on this Earth!”
Collins held his hands up in a surrender posture, hoping to calm Aberdeen down. “Why don’t you explain to me what it is exactly you’re talking about here.” And so the aged super-scientist did, though unlike the Hero Action Committee, Lester Collins stopped Abe every now and then to ask questions, nodding as Tyrannus clarified various points. Abe enjoyed this run-through of his data and figures, because the superhero didn’t seem to have any problem letting the man know that he didn’t understand how the numbers worked together.
What was even better, what spoke to his scientific passion for sharing knowledge and information, was the fact that Lester Collins not only seemed to want to know more, but as the explanation rolled forward, the man interjected sporadically, coming to conclusions that might have taken a normal educator or graduate student months to arrive at. In short, Lester Collins, the man once touted as ‘the greatest superhero who ever lived’, may well have also been the quickest study that Aberdeen Tyrannus had ever met.
His respect for the man tripled in the span of an hour as the computer ran its figures and simulations.
When Collins watched the last set of variables run through Abe’s simulation, he took a deep, steadying breath. There’s no denying what he’s shown them, Collins thought, his heart hammering in his chest. If the Freeze Ray isn’t used on the ice caps, we’re all going to be killed! He shook his head, and silently took the fresh cup of coffee that a mechanical arm offered him, descending from the ceiling.
“I understand that it’s a lot to take in, but do you see now why I felt the need to go to all of this trouble?” Collins just stared wide-eyed at the wrinkled forehead and bespectacled eyes of Tyrannus, not entirely sure what to say. Before he could respond, a beeping sound tore Abe’s attention to the perimeter monitors on the left bank of his console. He pressed a few buttons, then slid a panel aside in front of him. A sleek, silver microphone popped out on a spring, and he flipped a little switch next to it. “Come on in, gentlemen. Go around to the back of the house, and you’ll see a small door set into the ground. When you come to the access door, the code is ‘Fear Itself’.”
“Expecting company?”
“Henchmen,” Abe said, setting the microphone back into its port. “I called in a favor from an old friend as soon as I was off the horn with the committee. Now, what do you suppose we’ve got for time before they send troops in, guns blazing?”
“They said they were going to wait for me to report in,” Collins said. He pulled out his slender cellular phone, looking to Abe before dialing in Bantor’s number. “I can put it on speaker, if you’d like.”
“No need,” Abe said. He rose, stretched to crack his back, and slumped forward, the weight of the world on his shoulders. “I’m going to go meet the boys, let them know that you’re here and that they aren’t to mess about with you. Let me know what the fink says to you.”
“I will,” said Collins. He watched Abe stride away, hands clasped behind his back, the way he always walked when his hands were empty. Collins thought back to his first encounter with the reviled Dr. Tyrant. Even then, the mad scientist possessed an air of culture and etiquette, as though the rampant chaos that stormed through his mind could not quite touch the refinement of his cultured sensibilities. He dialed Bantor’s personal cell phone number, and felt no surprise when the congressman picked up on the second ring.
“This is Bantor,” the congressman rasped. Collins could hear a great deal of background noise, conversation, he realized, on the floor of the House.
“Sir, it’s Captain Righteous,” Collins said. “Is this a bad time?”
“Call me back in five minutes,” Bantor snapped, then terminated the call. When Collins redialed five minutes later, he could hear birds in the background instead. “So, you’ve made contact?”
“I have, sir. Mr. Bantor, Dr. Tyrant has his communications relay back up and running, and I’d like to address the entire committee, if it can be arranged, sir.” He could hear Bantor gnashing his teeth on the other end of the line, clearly not expecting this kind of call. “Congressman, is there a problem?”
“No, no problem. Listen, we’ve got two more items to discuss here today on the floor, but that should only take about forty minutes. I’ll get in touch with Devereux, he’ll get the committee reassembled immediately. Captain, are you in any danger? Have you been taken captive? I have strike teams ready for deployment at a moment’s notice,” Bantor said in a rush.
“Sir, I’m perfectly fine here,” Collins said, trying to keep Bantor’s panic from infecting him over the phone. “I believe it’s vital, however, that the entire committee be allowed the chance to have the situation here clarified, for their own peace of mind.” There was a pause, and then a soft chuckle from Bantor.
“Wait a minute, let me guess; he’s gone senile, hasn’t he? Is that it? Do we need to send a medical team in instead of soldiers?”
“I’ll make everything clear when I speak with the committee, sir,” Collins said, trying to imply by his tone of voice that Bantor had the right of the situation. Let him bring his guard down, he thought. Abe was right; this guy’s a fink.
“So you have everything in hand, Captain?”
“Everything’s under control here, sir,” Collins said. “I’ll be here with Dr. Tyrannus, and we’ll let you initiate the call.” Bantor hung up then, and Collins closed the phone, putting it back in his pants pocket. He then turned in the chair at the sound of a metal door whooshing open, and in strode Abe, followed by what appeared to be ten brutish-looking thugs, all armed with stun batons and dart guns.
“Boys, meet the legend himself,” Abe said, stretching an open palm towards Collins. “This, is Captain Righteous.” Collins tensed every muscle in his body, shooting up out of the chair in a defensive stance. The henchmen flinched as a unit, forming a protective ring around their employer. Abe smacked the back of the head of the man who stepped in front of him. “Don’t be daft, you fools! The Captain is a guest here! Where’s your manners, for God’s sakes?”
The henchmen all appeared to deflate, looking away and rubbing their heads, necks or wrists awkwardly. Collins let himself relax, taking a couple of strides towards the big ugly fellow standing between himself and Abe now. “Very professional response, gentlemen,” Collins said with a grin. “I’m impressed. Captain Righteous, though you can call me Lester,” he said, extending a hand to the hulking thug. To his surprise, the man returned the smile, which made the man almost handsome in a rough-hewn fashion.
“Brett Tanner, but most of me mates calls me Big Three,” said the man in a heavy English accent. “We usually refer to one anoffer by nickname or rank number when we’s on assignment.”
“I see,” said Collins. “So who’s in charge of this group?”
“I am, sir,” said the brute named Big Three. “Three’s the highest rank an official henchman can receive, sir, under the ‘Grunt’ or ‘Heavies’ category. These’re my boys, sir. We’ve been togever through six assignments, sir, and have only lost four men since we finished training.”
“I didn’t expect George to come though quite so readily,” Abe said offhandedly, coming around the big man to stand next to Collins. “So who’s the ranking Field Commander for the bunch of you,” he asked, adjusting his glasses.
“Kurtis Boe, sir, though we all calls him Number One.” Big Three looked up at Collins, who appeared perplexed. “Mr. Boe is an Elite class, sir, so he gets to be Number Two or Number One. Always serves as the first right-hand man under a side-kick or villain ally. Mr. Boe is quite talented, Dr. Tyrant,” he concluded, looking to Abe.
“Is he here?”
“He’s busy right now, sir, assessing the strength of enemy forces arrayed around the neighborhood. Last time I checked in wiv him, he was putting the finishing touches on rigging up remote control systems to commandeer control of HAC vehicles in the area. He’s gonna program them to drive north all at one time, fast as they can out of the area, sir. I don’t know how he does it, but Number One’s a right genius, he is.”
So, one here is practically brain dead, and another is quite likely a genius in his own right, Collins thought. “Are your men from the International Henchmen’s Union,” he asked. The big Pit Bull of a man smiled crookedly up at Captain Righteous and nodded.
“Aye, we is. Boss Farris made sure we was deployed on the double, which is good. We haven’t had a solid gig in about five months, since Tiger Tank got ripped apart by some new fellah,” Big Three said. He visibly shivered. “Don’t know who that chap was, but he literally ripped Tiger’s arms off and beat him to death wiv ‘em.” Collins and Abe both cringed at the thought.
“Can you describe this newcomer, in case we should run into him by any chance,” Abe asked.
“I only caught a glimpse of the guy,” said Big Three, his brow furrowing as he tried to recall what he’d seen. “Had some sort of armor like you used to wear, Captain, but the whole back of it was done up to look like a big ol’ American flag. Kind of silly-looking, if you ask me, but the man got results sure enough.”
“I’ll say,” Collins replied, shaking his head. “I thought Tiger Tank’s cybernetic arms were constructed of titanium, joints and attachment ports included.”
“They were,” the leader of the heavies said in a hushed voice. “Anyhow, what’d you want us to do first, boss,” he asked, looking to Abe.
“There’s a class 3 teleporter through that door over there,” he said, pointing to the green metal door tucked off to one side of the basement command chamber. “Take your men and get situated in the compound it takes you to. If you have anyone with mechanical inclinations, send them to the hangar. I’ve got about ten land assault vehicles that I didn’t have time to get around to putting back to working order in the rush.” Big Three saluted stiffly, then barked the orders at his fellow heavies, all of whom followed him towards the teleporter room.
When they were gone, Abe took his glasses off and absently cleaned them on the pale blue button shirt he wore under his lab coat. “Do you suppose the committee will be more reasonable with you speaking to them on my behalf?” Collins thought for a moment about the possibility, but he slowly shook his head, forced to accept the fact that Representative Bantor and the rest of the Hero Action Committee’s high command likely already made their collective mind up about how to deal with Abe in the coming days.
“No, I don’t think they will be,” Collins muttered. He folded his arms over his chest, the corded muscles bunching under the segmented armor. “Abe, we may well find ourselves having to defend this place. Do you have any other facilities up and running, or just kept quiet, that we can evacuate everybody to in the event we have to make a hasty retreat?”
“What’s with all of this ‘we’ business, Lester,” Abe asked, putting his glasses back on. “If they don’t like that you’re convinced, you can always tell them that you’re just unwilling to take action against me, then be on your merry way, no harm, no foul.” Collins offered the once-villain a wry grin then.
“Do you really expect me to just step aside if they refuse to listen?”
“Why wouldn’t you? I mean, you and I spent an entire generation trying to best one another, Lester. You’ve a reputation to uphold as my arch-enemy, or some other such nonsense, haven’t you? And you don’t strike me as the sort to just disobey orders.” Lester walked over to the command console, and tapped a few keys to bring up the data from the last simulation run again, displayed bright on the screen for Abe to see. Collins arched his neck to look up at the enormous monitor screen, his body squared up, radiating an aura of certainty and strength.
“My reputation, Abe? As Captain Righteous, I always stood for what was right, what was just. Or at least, that’s what I was always led to believe. Around the mid-80’s, though, I started questioning things. I still tried to do what was right, what was good. I tried to stand up for the citizenry. But I was little more than a tool, Abe, a tool wielded to accomplish very specific goals.” He turned from the monitor, a fierce glare locking on Abe. “As for orders, well, I’m a soldier. Always have been, always will be. Like any great soldier, I remember everything my first instructors taught me at basic training.”
“Oh, yeah? And what did they tell you, Lester,” Abe rasped, fascinated.
“A staff sergeant, Roeller, he told me and my squad, ‘Men, there will come times when you will want to question your orders. That’s normal. When those times come, ask yourself, are these orders good for the entire country we’re sworn to protect, or are they just good for a handful of people with something to gain? If the answer is the former, you follow the orders to the letter, and do them as well as you can. If the answer is the latter, you refuse as strongly as you can.’ Abe, I think in this case,” he said, thrusting one finger behind him and up at the screen displaying a projection of humanity’s likely demise in numerical form. “I would have to refuse.”