“With great power, comes great responsibility.”
-Uncle Ben, Spiderman
Colonel Brant Chambers walked into the bathroom on the second floor of his private home on Ohio Lane, flicking on the light with a practiced flick of the wrist. He took a long, hard look at himself in the mirror, wondering if his father would be proud of the accomplishments Brant had achieved thus far in his life. He wondered if his mother would have kept in touch with him this far into adulthood. Certainly she’d been consistent when he was in college, still demanding he call her once a week in his sophomore year, and he had. That hadn’t changed until his junior year.
By then, he was at West Point.
The decision to change from the University of Maine to a military education hadn’t been his only option, but it certainly had been one of only a few. At the time, he could have afforded to finish his studies at the U of M and still been comfortable, but there had been other factors to take into consideration. For starters, the majority of his courses centered on history and political sciences. An enrollment at West Point would fit that mold perfectly. Secondly, being an officer in the United States military would be one of the only legitimate ways for him to get what he wanted more than a college degree; vengeance.
“Mother, father,” he said to the mirror, leaning forward and gripping the sides of the sink until his knuckles whitened. “It won’t be long, now, I promise.” Colonel Chambers splashed some cold water on his face, rubbing at the bags under his eyes. He dried off with a nearby hand towel, then flipped the light off, heading for his bedroom. Once there, he looked around at the crisp, neat room in which he took what little sleep he could get. The room was, like most of the rest of the house, what many folks would refer to as Spartan. Minimal furniture, no real decorations on the walls to speak of, and an attention to cleanliness that bordered on obsession.
Brant Chambers’s home reflected his very being. As he changed out of his dress uniform into a baggy gray sweater and matching sweatpants, Chambers considered the course of his career. While he’d never be considered a legend in the Army, he certainly had left a lasting impression on every commanding officer he’d ever had. Smart, capable, efficient, Chambers had been one of the fastest-rising officers of his time. He had enrolled in West Point at the age of twenty-three, back in 1994. Now, eighteen years later, he’d made full-bird Colonel before even turning forty.
In 1999, after serving as an officer for only five years and at the rank of Captain, he’d been granted permission to join the Hero Action Committee as an Assistant Oversight Officer. Through the years, he’d since maneuvered himself strategically to the post he now held with the organization, as Head Officer of Logistics and Deployment. A lesser-known title within the HAC, he nonetheless wielded a great deal of influence over the day-to-day operations of the group’s two-thousand permanent and three-thousand part-time members.
Yet Erin Bantor, head of the organization, had only spoken directly to Colonel Chambers three times in as many years. As Chambers exited his bedroom, switching off the light, he smiled at the extent of Bantor’s ignorance. Sometimes, it really is bliss, congressman, he thought. Chambers headed to the staircase at the end of the hallway and headed up to the second floor of the house. As a Colonel, and as an officer with the HAC, his financial compensation was quite considerable, allowing him to purchase this house on the southern outskirts of D.C. with no troubles.
The stairs opened up on another hallway, dividing the second floor into several rooms on either side, each with a distinct purpose. In the first room on the left, a workout room, complete with a weight bench and three compact exercise machines and a large plasma-screen television. The Colonel kept it tuned almost constantly to CNN, so he could keep up-to-date with what the media presented as current politics, even if it wasn’t wholly accurate to what he knew. Perception, someone had once told him, means more than the truth to most.
The second upstairs room, on the right side of the hall, was filled with book cases, and all of the volumes placed thereupon were reference tomes, encyclopedias, biographies and historical studies related to military warfare. Only one set of books, on a mahogany case to the immediate right of the door, stood out of place. They were all non-fiction titles, studies and exposes on numerous organized criminal groups and mafia families. If one opened the second book on that shelf from the left, they would have perhaps been quite surprised to discover that it had not only been looked through a great number of times over the years, but Brant Chambers’s father, William Chambers, had been mentioned frequently throughout.
William Chambers had been the chief enforcer for an enormous syndicate in Boston back in the 70’s and 80’s. The money that had gone towards paying for Brant’s education had been soaked in blood.
The second door on the left side of the hallway upstairs led to a simple bathroom, which the Colonel only used when he intended to spend a good long while up there.
He stopped in front of the door at the end of the hall, taking a deep, steadying breath. He took a small silver key out of the pocket of his sweatpants, put it in the lock, and twisted to the left as he lifted up on the doorknob. It was a small detail, one he’d paid an extra two-hundred dollars to have implemented by the local locksmith after he’d bought the house. It wouldn’t deter a professional thief, but for the average home intruder or snoop who came into his home with ulterior motives, it would be enough to keep them out.
Colonel Chambers pushed the door open, revealing a home office that could put to shame most attorneys’ professional offices. Dominated by an enormous cherry wood desk, filled with the scent of vanilla from automated air fresheners plugged into four outlets set low to the floor around the room, being in this space filled him with an inner peace he couldn’t describe in words. On the walls, placed in gorgeous glass-and-bronze frames, hung various awards, certificates, and preserved newspaper and magazine articles. One document stood on the wall behind the Colonel’s desk, his diploma from West Point, which pronounced him salutatorian of his class.
Most of these documents he ignored in favor of a small newspaper article hung on the left wall from the doorway, striding slowly, almost reverently, over to it. His eyes took on a vaguely glossy sheen as the headline of the article sent his mind back in time to a single telephone call he’d received in his dormitory at the University of Maine in February of 1994. The headline read as follows:
‘Supervillain Battle Claims Lives of Local Mafia and Citizens’.
The article told the story of how a large-scale battle between the forces of the Hero Action Committee and a new supervillain at the time, a man calling himself Tiger Tank, had spilled from the outskirts of Boston all the way into the downtown business district. The carnage had been widespread, as neither fighting force even attempted to minimize the damage to municipal or civilian property or life.
Brant’s father had been among the casualties. According to the article, this had been a major blow to local law enforcement, who’d been hoping to make a break in their investigation into the activities of William Chambers, who was suspected to be working for an organized crime family at the time. The enforcer’s entire restaurant, suspected to be a front containing vital documents to the syndicate’s business, had gone up in flames.
The Colonel ran a single trembling finger down the right side of the framed article, stopping next to a picture of the supervillain being led away from the scene of battle in restraints.
He moved on to a magazine article, also framed, on the other side of the office’s only window. An interview conducted with one Aberdeen Tyrannus, himself formerly a supervillain, and the man responsible for designing and assembling the mechanized combat suit that Tiger Tank had used during that first campaign of terror. ‘I wasn’t brought up on charges,’ Abe had told the reporter, ‘because in America, you’re free to sell your inventions to whoever will pay the most for them. If I could be charged for what that man did with the suit, then Heckler and Koch should be charged for every gun that’s been used in the commission of a crime.’
Except there was nobody to foist the blame off onto now, not for Aberdeen Tyrannus.
Bantor and the rest of the puppets ostensibly in charge of the Hero Action Committee had gone ahead and authorized use of Major Patriot against the former Dr. Tyrant. “Just like they did against Tiger Tank,” the Colonel whispered with a smile slithering across his face. He tapped a color picture of Tyrannus in the lower right corner of the magazine’s framed page. “And we know how that turned out, don’t we?”
His calculations had not accounted for the inclusion of Captain Righteous in the whole scenario, but this only strengthened the Colonel’s feeling of impending triumph. He giggled, then opened the bottom right drawer of his desk as he seated himself, pulling out a bottle of Johnny Walker Red scotch and a crystal snifter, pouring himself a heavy dose of the liquor. He raised the glass to a portrait of his father, mounted above the office door. “Cheers, dad,” he said.
The Leader took the drink down in two swigs, then set to work on his next set of orders.
Abe and Lester accompanied a group of nearly one hundred assorted henchmen of all shapes and sizes and both genders, all crammed into a mid-sized chamber just off of the command center room Farris had briefed them in. The entire floor of the chamber was programmed to act as a teleportation device, and using coordinates that Abe had provided to his long-time friend and fellow villain, technicians had sent them in mere seconds all the way from north of Seattle to the loading ramp leading down into the underground base in Nevada.
As soon as they showed up, Abe and Lester led the first batch of henchmen down to the already-opening door, where they were greeted by Kurt Boe and Big Three. The two leading henchmen offered a stiff salute, which Abe returned before sending them up the ramp to greet and direct another six groups that would be following behind.
When Abe led Lester inside the load out hangar of the Nevada base, he stopped and stared in a hybrid of nostalgia and despair. The assault vehicles and combat drones all lined up on opposite sides of the bay were ancient, rusted, decrepit things. The drones were of the remote-controlled variety, a model he hadn’t used since the early 70’s. Blocky robots and little more, they hadn’t even been armed with on-board weapons systems, instead equipped with assault rifles attached with bolts and straps to the left hands, short blades held in the right. He shook his head and chuckled low in his throat.
“Can you believe I used to consider those things a leap forward in military hardware,” he asked Lester.
“By most standards, those would still be considered useful on standard battlefields,” Collins pointed out. He followed Abe as the aged super-scientist strode towards the drones, a slight hitch in the older man’s step slowing them down. When he stood before the closest of the vaguely man-like machines, Abe reached out a wrinkled, frail hand, stroking lightly the sphere of its head unit, the front of which was dominated by a transmitting camera.
“Brings back memories,” Abe whispered. Lester glanced only for a moment at his once-foe before locking his eyes solidly on the marching henchmen behind them. In that moment, he’d seen a single tear coursing down Aberdeen Tyrannus’s cheek. Abe let his hand fall away slowly to his side and sighed, his entire frame slouching. “I can hardly remember why I did any of this to begin with, Lester,” he said, still whispering. “All I know is that I thought I could do things better than the people in power. I thought I could make the world right with my technology, with my intellect. I thought I could be a better leader to the people. What happened?”
Lester considered this question for what seemed like a long time before he finally put a gentle hand on Abe’s shoulder, still facing the opposite direction of the super-scientist. “What happened, Abe? A whole lot of less intelligent leaders decided that they thought they knew better, and they didn’t want the old game changed against their interests. So they filled a young man’s head with all the right red-white-and-blue bullshit that they’ve used to wage wars, even on the streets of their own country, and sent him after you. I’m sorry, Abe.”
“Sorry? For what?”
“For having been that young man.” With that, Lester Collins stepped away, following the henchmen further into the new lair of Dr. Tyrant.
Congressman Bantor picked up the phone on only the third ring, an amazing feat, considering how heavily he’d medicate himself to get to sleep. His voice muzzy with drugged sleep, he said, “Bantor here, who’s this?”
“It’s Major Patriot, sir,” said the brusque Ultra-Soldier on the other end of the line. “I’m calling to request a clearance.”
“Oh,” said Bantor, rubbing his eyes and shifting himself up in his bed so that he was sitting with the headboard against his back. In the darkened bedroom of his D.C. apartment, everything looked foggy, unreal. But he had enough sense about him to at least go through a quick mental checklist. “Why isn’t commander Pitch making the request?”
“Can’t, sir. The commander is addressing the unit right now, wanted me to place the call on his behalf.”
“Oh, all right. What’s the request?”
“Sir, commander Pitch believes that Captain Righteous may try to return to his former headquarters to retrieve equipment and data that could be used to assist Dr. Tyrant in retrieving the Freeze Ray from its current location. We need clearance to confiscate and occupy the property in preparation for a pre-emptive strike in the event that happens. We spoke with General Farat first, but he informed us that the property is considered locked down without your go-ahead, sir.”
Bantor took a moment to enjoy the authority he wielded. He knew the general didn’t care for him, knew that if Farat had his way, non-military personnel wouldn’t be allowed to be in charge of the Hero Action Committee, especially since so many of the DOD’s finest wound up among its ranks. “Well, you can inform the general that you and the commander hereby have my full permission to occupy the property and make use of it as you will. As a matter of fact, any HAC technology you recover there should be immediately returned to its respective department once this whole fiasco is finished. Keep up the good work, Major.”
“We will, sir. Thank you, sir.” The line cut out then, and Erin Bantor hung the phone up.
Lester began work of his own right after being shown by Abe and a couple of his top men, already familiar with the layout of the base thanks to arriving earlier, to a large set of private rooms reserved for any #2 Abe might have brought onboard over the years. He began by stripping out of his segmented armor and hopping into a shower stall that had been installed over twenty years earlier, yet had already been revived to perfect working order by George Farris’s crack team of henchmen-for-hire.
After getting himself cleaned up, Lester changed into fresh clothes left behind for him by another nameless, faceless minion. He wouldn’t be putting the armor back on just yet; he had to do some planning first, and that would require moving swiftly about the facility. A map of the entire compound had been laid out on the bed he would be using along with his clothes, and he studied it for ten minutes, committing it to memory, before heading off into the compound’s hallways to find Kurt Boe.
Asking several busy henchmen flitting to and fro throughout the facility about Boe, Lester ultimately wound his way down several towering, arched tunnels lined with foot-thick steel plates and filled with rolling tables and carts laden with gadgets and equipment that had been removed due to age or loss of function. After a few minutes in which he felt almost lost, Lester thought hard about the most recent minion to see Boe. Saw him heading to the communications room about fifteen minutes ago, the woman had said.
From where he was currently standing, Lester looked straight up at a power cable insulation pipe, and saw what few other men would see- an identification number stamped into a length of the piping near the wall. Closing his eyes, he checked mentally with the map, and hustled off to the communications room. He knocked three times, and when the door opened, Kurt Boe stood before him with a smirk. “Captain Righteous, please, come on in,” said Boe. Abe’s current head henchman was dressed at the moment in a simple black turtleneck sweater, beige khakis, and Converse tennis shoes. The room itself swarmed around Lester, as half a dozen men disconnected and removed old equipment, replacing it with newer, sleeker machines and peripherals.
“Thank you,” Lester said, sweeping into the room. He and Boe took a seat off to one side of the chamber, keeping out of the way of the workers as they set about their tasks. “Listen, I need to take a splinter of these men with me to my old base in New York City. Part of the Freeze Ray is there.”
“I see,” said Boe. He rubbed his chin contemplatively for a moment, leaning forward with his elbows propped on his knees. “It’s your old headquarters, though. What makes you think you’ll need any of our men to go there with you to retrieve the component?”
“By now, the place will likely be crawling with either Black Ops specialists, or elites from within the HAC organization. I didn’t tell Abe, but I’m not as potent as I used to be, Kurt. I’ve slowed down, I’m not as strong, and without that armor of mine, I think some of the new weapons out there could put a serious hurt on me. I’ll need support.” Boe lowered his head for a moment, clearly thinking not of whether or not to agree to a deployment, but more likely wondering who he should send.
“I’ll have a group of twenty men ready for you to head out with tomorrow.” Boe kept his eyes directed at the floor, though he didn’t give off any hint of being uncomfortable with Lester. The man’s focused, Lester thought with more than a little admiration. If he’d become a soldier, I don’t doubt he’d be special forces of some kind, maybe Delta Force. “Some of the engineers are helping Dr. T get a new teleportation chamber set up over in zone C, smaller deployments, but longer range. They’ll have it up and running by then. Do you have the precise coordinates of your old base?”
“I do, but I think landing us a few blocks away would be better,” Lester said. Boe grinned broadly, and looked him in the eyes.
“So you can get a good look at what your surroundings will be like, maybe spot hostiles before showing up at the front doors?” Lester nodded. “I’d been thinking just that, too. There’s something else we should consider, Captain,” Boe said quietly, wringing his hands. “Mr. Farris had a number of us back at the Union working on counter-assault tactics when dealing with the HAC teams, researching the history of their operations from the last ten years. Things have changed a lot in these last five of those ten years. You worked with them, so you know a lot of it.”
“True,” said Lester, cocking an eyebrow at Boe. “But something tells me you have a concern, yes?”
“I do,” said Boe. He looked around at the men working in the room, letting his eyes linger on each one for just a few seconds before turning his full attention back to Lester. “Captain Righteous, have you ever heard of something called the ‘Drop Protocol’?” Lester just blinked at him, staying silent. “It’s a very simple mission protocol enacted by the authorization of two HAC officers; the Head Director, and the Head of Logistics and Equipment. If they sign off on it, all bets are off, Captain.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Drop Protocol fully absolves all HAC personnel of municipal or pedestrian damages during combat operations. Essentially, it protects HAC troops and agents from any and all criminal or civil charges, regardless of what they do, or how they do it, once they’ve engaged enemy forces in a campaign. The opposing forces don’t even have to be near each other after first contact, and we’ve already had that.”
Lester didn’t understand the dread seriousness of Boe’s tone at first, because he didn’t get what Boe was driving at. A minute later, when Lester’s mind finished going through all of the logical connections inferred by what Boe had just told him, his entire body stiffened. “Then, that whole area of the city,” he rasped.
“Yes. Unless you can get in and out quick and hard, that whole area could be turned into a war zone, and the blame would be solely laid at our feet,” Boe said quietly. “That’s why I need until tomorrow afternoon to put together your team. I want to send only the best we’ve got at this sort of thing. I also want to get you a recon suit to put over your armor. We have your measurements from bio scans, so it’ll just take a couple of hours to adjust one for you.”
Lester nodded, then got up and silently left the communications room, heading back for his own quarters. He hadn’t taken the chance to rest yet. Some sleep right now would do him a world of good, and for once, Lester Collins wasn’t going to resist getting some shut-eye. He had a feeling that once he departed for New York with the hand-picked crew Boe assembled for him, he wouldn’t be getting a good amount of sleep for a long time.
“I am Aberdeen Tyrannus,” Abe said quietly to himself, looking around the dusty bedroom that he’d never stayed in. The entire compound had only been used once before, and only for a couple of brief days spent between campaigns. He’d gotten no sleep then; there had simply been too many plans to tend to, and he had been younger and filled with the energy of only the brilliant and the insane. He was no longer quite certain which of those two aspects had driven him more in his earlier years. Might have been an even mix of both, he mused. He heaved a sigh, looking around the room. “I am Aberdeen Tyrannus, and this is my legacy.”
Though he hadn’t visited the room in quite a long time, Abe had ensured that any and all clippings of his accolades over the years were assembled and hung upon the walls of this room. Two henchmen, always dispatched personally by George Farris, would come down here every couple of years to rearrange the room and tidy it up a bit. They took photos, sending them off to Abe for approval, which he always gave without any need for scrutiny. The henchmen knew what they were doing.
Yet as he looked around at the photographs and articles on the walls, he found himself almost disgusted with his professional history. His greatest works had come in his later years, when he was no longer using the ‘take-no-prisoners’ approach that had earned him such respect and fear in his time as a supervillain. But there were fewer photos and articles from those times; he’d been less active, more thoughtful in his schemes. The earlier years of his career were filled with images of destruction and rampage, with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of innocent civilian injuries and casualties.
One of the articles from his fourth campaign of terror had the following headline: ’78,000 Slain In Kansas City!’ Abe felt tears burning at the backs of his eyes, and wiped an unsteady hand across them. What had I been thinking? When he finished looking around, Abe took his lab coat off and draped it over the back of a wheeled desk chair placed in front of a roll-top desk of sturdy cherry wood on the right side of the room. He sighed and then slipped his shoes off, turning around and scanning the walls calmly. He was almost serene as he glared around at the photos and articles.
“I, am Aberdeen Tyrannus,” he whispered to himself. Abe strode quietly to the left wall from the doorway, reaching out and plucking one of the framed articles. He held it against his stomach, staring down silently at the words printed there. He carried it slowly to a large square trashcan set next to the desk, passing his left hand over the headline of the article. ‘Dr. Tyrant Ravages Phoenix- 3000 Vaporized’.
He dropped the frame unceremoniously into the can, then turned around, and set about repeating the process. It was nearly an hour before he felt satisfied, slipping quietly under the covers and falling quickly to sleep. He needed just a few hours to rest; it would be much easier now that there was nothing decorating the left wall of the room.
In his own quest for command, for control, for power, Erin Bantor had burned a lot of bridges, made a great number of enemies, and nearly incited a riot at the end of his last re-election by proclaiming aloud that ‘the black times are behind us’ when delivering his acceptance speech. Rumored to have made some racist remarks at a committee hearing a month before the campaign started, he’d already been targeted hard by his Democratic challenger’s election organization. Using the phrase ‘black times’ had been an unconscious slip, one he hadn’t even thought of as offensive in any way at the time.
But the trick of politics, he had been reminded, was to guide by perception. Perception was everything. Perception was the reason, at just after six o’clock in the morning, he awoke to discover himself feeling out of sorts. The phone call he’d taken from Major Patriot a few hours before had roused him from slumber, groggy and unthinking. He wondered, briefly, why commander Pitch had not phoned him himself. Surely a stalwart soldier such as he would follow protocols to the letter, wouldn’t he?
But Bantor knew better than to assume such a thing. He knew Pitch largely by reputation, and from reading mission reports submitted by the veteran soldier. He understood that politics played their part in every facet of American life, particularly in the military. Sipping his exotic Argentinian coffee at his kitchen table, giving his wife a flirtatious pat on the behind as she slipped through the kitchen, he reasoned with himself that there was nothing out of the ordinary about Pitch delegating the duty of contacting him to Major Patriot. After all, he thought, it was nothing more really than the commander exercising his command of the group by delegating the communications duty to the Ultra-Soldier.
Getting dressed a few minutes later, Bantor thought about the day’s business. He would be meeting with the HAC’s Head of Logistics, Colonel Chambers, in a couple of hours. It wasn’t that he wanted particularly to discuss anything with the man. Bantor personally found Chambers to be about as charismatic as a block of wood, with all of the grace of one to match. But Chambers performed his duties to the Hero Action Committee flawlessly; without him at the helm, things could easily have turned to chaos several years before, when the organization had to undergo a mandatory reorganization, thanks to the Senate Defense Committee’s nosiness.
Chambers himself had requested the meeting, which also put Bantor at ease. There had been no insisting or attempts to throw his weight around, which General Farat did at every opportunity. Instead, there had been an official communiqué, delivered via fax, at Bantor’s congressional office, an unnecessary but much appreciated politeness. ‘Director Bantor, I should like to discuss HAC matters with you at your earliest convenience. The matter is somewhat urgent, but I should not like to upset your already busy schedule regarding this. Thank you.’
It had been the greatest form of etiquette that Bantor had seen among the ranking members of the HAC since taking over the organization. He didn’t realize he’d been played, or how brilliantly, but it didn’t matter to him. To Erin Bantor, the missive had come across as subservient, and there was nothing that pleased the congressman more than being reminded that he was in a position of authority, a post of power.
When it all came down to it, that was all that Erin Bantor, and men like him, ever truly wanted out of life; power.