The Adventures of Sidekick Carl Part 11!

 I'm back with another installment of Sidekick Carl. As usual, here's links for the first and previous installments, and while I'm at it the scene I put in just to introduce the character. By the way, I found the full quote featured below, but stayed with what I had.

The eyes were what showed, huge and brightly, deeply red, filling the silhouette that was the face. “I am Abl C’Doen,” the voice said. “I come from a world beyond time and space as you know it. I can bestow great wisdom upon you, or I can do great harm. All I ask for is that you follow my instructions when I call upon you… you, your successors, and perhaps your children. And there will be a limit, at least once, as many as three times, and then you will again be free to do as you please.” Three men looked at each other, one in a wheelchair, one with a mustache, and a third who drank from a flask. It was the man in the wheelchair who nodded…

Then the cartoon blinked out as the TV turned off. A woman, the same who had given her husband coordinates for Dana Schachter’s RV, turned away with a sigh. “Nonsense,” she said. “That’s not how it happened at all…”

* * *

By the time the intruder showed signs of regaining consciousness, Carl and Dana had him tied up with a cable from a winch at the front of her RV. “His name is Ivan Trepan,” Carl said. He was back in his jumpsuit and helmet. “He worked as a specialist in reverse engineering. What he really did was hacking, industrial espionage and the occasional burglary. One of his clients paid him to find out what a competitor who did contracting for the Agency was really working on. We never did find out ourselves. Something to do with quantum particles. He found a machine, then he turned it on, and the next anyone knew, the building was turned inside out. A team from the Agency went in, to figure out what happened. They assumed anyone who had been in there was already dead, until one of them saw a Deinonychus…”

“Yeah,” Dana said, “I remember the cartoon, now that I think about it. Did you really fight him? Does he know you, I mean, from back then?”

He leaned in to examine the captive. He was very overweight, and clearly heavily built to begin with. “He fought a lot of heroes,” he said. “Constructor and I were the first. He was on his own, probably just trying to figure out what he’d become. We captured him, but then he escaped. Constructor fought him two, maybe three times after that. I was along twice. By then, he went back to being paid help. He worked for Audrey, the Raven, a few others. The last was probably Colonel Stryker… At least, we couldn’t think of any other way a renegade Marine got a pygmy hippo to guard his control room. It was Captain Thunder who beat him that time, if it was him. After that blew over, he dropped out, just gone. Constructor figured he turned into something nobody would be looking for.” He pulled the figure upright and stared at his face.

“So,” Dana interrupted, “I don’t suppose he’s the kind who would come out of hiding just to settle an old grudge.”

“No,” Carl said, a little more thoughtfully. “Absolutely not. He’s a goon, pure and simple. Just with more power and brains than usual.”

Dana leaned forward to look into his eyes. “Can we hold him?” she said. “Without killing him?”

“Well, whatever he does isn’t like the cartoons,” Carl said. “For one thing, he can only imitate warm-blooded vertebrates, and he needs to touch it or see it first. He can’t just turn into something make-believe like a griffin or a unicorn, either, or at least he never pulled it off. For another, he can’t use the transformation to heal an injury; hurt him in one form, he’ll still be hurt when he turns into something else. The big thing is, he can’t do anything about his mass; nothing can mess with that. If he turned into an elephant or a rat, it would be as heavy as he is, and proportioned accordingly. And that’s how he got the way he is. At first, he was only a little over 200 pounds; dangerous, but not too much for a big-league superhuman. He had to put on weight so he could turn into bigger things. He must’ve been over 500 pounds, before he disappeared… Thinking about it now, Constructor must have been wondering about the dirk cat in the Angeles zoo came from, after he spent months searching the same country…”

At that, Ivan finally raised his head and opened his eyes. “Okay, you got me,” he rasped. “Was the dirk cat in the zoo. Perfect cover, if you think about it.”

“Carl,” Dana said, “can I help?”

“Get in the RV,” Carl said. “Start the engine. Put the gear in reverse.”

“Damn,” Ivan rumbled. “You always were the cold one. For what it’s worth… Constructor prob’ly wasn’t wrong. Did my own search, before I got caught. Needed to know, in case they ever got a female for a breeding program. Found scents, tracks, bones, eventually. Might’ve been 30 years old, then. Maybe more, not less.”

Carl dropped to a crouch. “You know what I want,” he said. “If it came to that, it’s more important to me than keeping you here. Who sent you?”

Ivan only laugh. “You said yourself, I’m a goon with brains,” he said. “Smart goons don’t talk.”

“I suppose not,” Carl said. “Any chance you’d tell me how the client found you?”

Ivan tried to scratch, in a way that only made sense for a cat. “Found me in the zoo,” he said. “Told me they knew who I was, said the zookeepers were going to find out. I already knew. They gave me a ride, said they had a job.”

“They,” Carl said.

Ivan laughed again. “It’s always `they’,” he said. “They come and go, they can fall and be replaced, but the powers and principalities of theyness always remain.”

“Bill the Galactic Hero, by Harry Harrison,” Carl said. “Not exact, but not bad after 8 years in a zoo. So… did they say why?”

“They didn’t know,” Ivan said. “Or knew, and still didn’t understand. I could tell.”

As he spoke, Carl looked up uneasily. There was a sound, still faint. His gaze snapped back to the captive. “But there was more, wasn’t there?” he said. “You may be the kind who asks why, but you wouldn’t do anything without the `how’. You tried to kill me before, and never even came that close. You would have told them just how hard it is to kill me, if they didn’t already know. So what did they give you, to convince you it was worth trying again?”

“Oh, they knew,” Ivan said. “Had data, from a dozen places. I was impressed. They had a diagram, too. Places the nanites could be slow to respond, centers of nanite production, possible power sources…”

Carl shook his head. “There had to be more,” he said. “You were sent because you could try the brute force approach and still get away if it didn’t work. And, of course, you won’t talk. But the only real point  would be to figure out if they needed to try another way. Something new, something anyone who investigated would know had never been tried before…”

“Tell me something I didn’t know,” Ivan said.

Carl cocked his head slightly. “Dana,” he called out, “back up. Fast.” He could make out the frown on her face, even as she hit the gas.

He realized afterward that they hadn’t figured on the proportions. But all he saw was the head and neck growing longer and longer, so fast that the tightly bound torso contracted. That was when one arm and then another swung free, already rapidly expanding into enormous leathery wings. He dived into a fissure in the rock, just before a bill as log as he was tall could run him through. As he stared up, the creature seemed to freeze in mid-air. A loop of the cable was still around its foot. The creature gave a shriek of clear desperation, then it pulled free. Dana had gone 100 yards before she brought the RV to a halt.

Carl rose and turned, in time to see an armored figure step into the path of the distant headlights. A visor snapped up. “Damn it, Carl,” the agent said, “couldn’t you wait for backup just once?”

“Actually, no,” Carl said. With that, he sat down on an outcropping, still staring up into the starry sky.