The Adventures of Sidekick Carl Part 12!

 Here's yet another installment of Sidekick Carl, a little late, and introducing my best gag character. By the way, there's a terrible pun that might not stand out if you don't know Spanish.  I'm so used to it (and to a lesser extent Serbo-Croatian) that if I saw a foreign language that pronounced "h" and "j" the way we do, I'd probably get it wrong. As usual, here's the first and latest installments.

The screen showed a stylized image of a man or manlike figure, clad in bulky gray armor that seemed made of cylinders and other primary shapes. At the moment, he was winning an equally stylized duel with a sort of mechanical dragon on wheels. With the final blow, the machine staggered and collapsed, already missing its head. The man turned to a woman who had watched the fight. Subtitles rolled as he spoke in Spanish, “No, it is not possible! It was too easy!”

On cue, a screen that filled one side of the room came on, revealing an identical dragon. “You fool, you have destroyed a mere drone!” it said. “While you were fighting my duplicate, I raised my airborne command center and summoned my army to the assembly point. They will gather in 15 minutes- 500 miles from here!”

“Oh, Hombre Acero!” the woman cried. “What shall we do? It is too much- even for you!”

This time, the subtitles remained in Spanish as the hero raised his fist and cried out: “Mi nombre is Hombre Acero, y yo puedo hacer lo!”

The Toxo Warrior who had been a passenger changed the channel. “Of course, `he’ could do it,” he said. “There were still three of them.”  Then he turned, back to the inscrutable dragon-like head on the work table.

* * *

 

Carl and Dana sat with the agent named John Carter on the rear deck. He peered through the door that Ivan Trepan had smashed in as a dirk-toothed cat. “You dealt with him, that’s fair enough,” he said. “We were still looking for him. You didn’t here it from me, but we were pretty sure it was him in the zoo. There was a genetic test; someone at the lab called us when they saw the results. By the time we got there, he was in the wind again. At least it wasn’t hard to get the zoo to keep it quiet. I suppose you tried to question him…”

“You had him custody before,” Carl said. “You know what he’s like. He loves to talk, the one thing he won’t do is answer questions. The only other thing we could have done was kill him.”

“There was a time when you might have,” Agent Carter answered. “But I suppose she thought differently.” He looked Dana over. “No offense, mind you. Ivan’s a tough target by any standard. I would have said it would take a Grade 4 superhuman or higher to have an even chance against him hand to hand. Even then, the only one who ever really tried was Constructor, and that was after he broke a shovel over his head.

Dana shrugged, a dramatic gesture in itself with an ordinary human for reference. “I went through the tests once, and they gave me a Three,” she said. “The guy who did the measurements told me after, my kicks had the same force as one of Constructor’s punches.”

Carter looked back to Carl and sighed. “Dammit all, Carl,” he said. “I used to tell you and Constructor, you never understood what we do, or what we were really been up against. Basiliskus, Dr. Hydro, The Raven… They were small potatoes. Okay, maybe that’s not fair to you; but still, they were symptoms, not the disease. They were the products of things that happened decades earlier, set in motion by beings most people couldn’t imagine. The only reason you could keep things mostly under control was that they were out of the picture.”

“They weren’t out of our picture,” Carl said. “We fought Abl C’doen, twice.”

“You met Abl C’doen,” the agent countered. “Even we never figured out what he was doing, but if he had really meant to put up a fight…” He shook his head.

After a pause, he turned to Dana. “Here’s something you deserve to know,” he said. “The Agency has files on 223 `superheroes’, the superhumans we counted friendly. Know how many are left?” After a moment, he answered himself, “Seven. Including two of the Hombres Aceros, and everybody knows what happens to the first one.”

“There aren’t many `villains’ left, either,” Carl said. “I could cover most of first and second tiers just with the ones I saw buy it myself. Basiliskus, torched and probably phaged. The Raven, dropped 150 stories without his wings. Dr. Hydro, sucked wherever his artificial wormhole went. Stryker, crippled. Haj Tarm, trampled by a mob of his subjects. Gravitar, blown into the sun. The Deadly Clowns, killed each other with their lethal pies… The only ones who are left are the ones who were smart enough to stay low, Audrey and Destructo and Big Red, and they already figured out they can do better on the convention circuit than they ever did in the supercriminal ecosystem.”

Dana frowned. “But they can’t all be accounted for,” she said. “Don’t you have security for the superhumans who are left?”

“To be honest, that’s why we let the convention circuit exist,” Carter said. “It was easier to keep the bad guys out in the open than keep watching the last of the heroes full time. Most of them would kill their agents before they looked up any of their old scores.”

“I’ll say,” Carl said. “Audrey told me that herself.”

“Okay,” Dana said. “Then tell me this… What would it really take to kill him?”

Carter actually chuckled. “We did that for every one of the superheroes,” he said. “You could call it insurance. Carl was tough, but we still identified several feasible lines of attack. Plasma weapons, incendiaries, an electromagnetic pulse, or an extremely powerful acid.”

“None of which Ivan had,” Carl said.

There was another long pause before Carter broke the silence. “That… brings us to the current situation,” he said. “36 hours before the two of you blew out of the convention, two intruders breached a secure facility a few hundred miles away, and then escaped a full security perimeter. They wore yellow suits and gas masks, plus hats. The only thing they took was 600 gallons of a chemical called Solvent G.”

Carl showed no reaction, but Dana knew immediately that he knew what it was. After a moment, he explained for her benefit, “It’s one of the most powerful acids in the world. Powerful enough to harm me. It’s really a concentrate, meant to be mixed in a solution with other chemicals. The amount he's talking about would make enough for a vessel the size of a swimming pool, still twice as powerful as sulphuric acid.” He looked at Carter. “Do you think it was the Toxo Warriors?”

Carter sighed again. “You tell me,” he said. “Do you think they could have lived?”

Carl shook his head. “The explosion that took out their lab was the closest I ever came to checking out,” he said. He turned to Dana. “Constructor and I got caught by the blast while we were running through the door we used to get in. I threw myself around him, or we both probably would have died. The fire burned up more than half my suit and 20% of the inner polymer sheath. The heat and the chemicals destroyed about a quarter of the nanites. It took me four weeks to recover.”

He looked back to Carter. “If anyone’s appearing in their gear, my guess it’s copycats,” he said. “Constructor’s daughter traced their gear to commercial suppliers. Others could have done the same thing. It would be a surprise if it didn’t happen, really.”

“Oh, it has,” Carter said. “We caught every one of them, and made sure they all got put away for a long time without giving them attention. Fortunately, none of them had the knowhow to kill anyone.”

 

“What about the ones you’re after?” Carl said.

“One of our guards was killed, by a chemical spill he probably caused,” Carter said. “Another was hospitalized, for an allergic reaction to a nonlethal gas. By all indications, the intruders were trying to avoid fatalities.”

Carl visibly sagged in relief. “It’s not them, then,” he said without hesitation. “At least, something changed…”

Carter nodded. “Your reports never said much about their dynamics,” he said. “Did it ever seem like one was dominant, or the other reluctant?”

Carl shook his head. “I could never tell them apart,” he said. “Constructor was sure there was one who did most of the talking. Beyond that, there was no difference that. Certainly, either one of them would have killed anyone in their way.”

“I see,” Carter said. He gave another sigh. “There’s one more thing, Carl. Something we held back, so the copycats wouldn’t get more ideas than they already had.” He laid out a series of photos. Three of them were grainy black-and-white photos, clearly from security cameras. Two were color photos, one of which included Carl and Constructor.

“After the blast, Lauren did a new analysis of the available images,” he said. He tapped the two color photos, and one of the monochrome images. “Based on height and other biometric data, these show the same two individuals. I’ll admit, even we only have 85% confidence which of the two is which in any given photo. The similarities strongly suggest that they are fraternal relatives- brothers, in other words, as Constructor thought.”

Then he pointed the other two images, including the first. “These two, on the other hand, differ significantly. One of them is almost certainly in the other photos. But we arrived at 97.5% probability that the other is an individual not in the other pictures.”

He matter-of-factly stacked the photos and took a match to them. “You and Constructor may have fought the same pair. But there weren’t just two, there were three.”