Fiction: The Adventures of Sidekick Carl part 13!

 Just getting to the last post of the "off" week, decided on a catchup installment of Sidekick Carl. It's mostly crunching exposition, which is really what a lot of the story has been so far. I hope to step things up in the next few installments. As usual, here's the first and previous installments, plus one more I decided I had to revise. More to come, hopefully soon.

The Toxo Warrior had turned off the TV and turned to a magazine. He glanced between the dragon-like head and a magazine. Finally, he set the magazine down. “I want to talk to you,” he said.

“You may speak,” the head replied. “I may answer.”

“I want to know, why send that freaky shaper after Sidekick Carl?” he said. “I mean, we fought him, but it was nothing personal then, and there’s nothing personal now. And I know all about what happened to you. You were where we found you since Sidekick Carl was still all human. So, why’s he a big deal to you either way?”

The teeth of the dragon shimmered before it spoke. “His creation was the result of plans I set in motion long ago,” it said. “He knows more than he thinks he knows, and he holds secrets he still does not understand, secrets that could be used against us.”

“But nobody knows what we’re doing,” the Toxo Warrior said. “We already went out on a limb getting the chemicals. Going after him just means more heat that could come back to us."

“The risk is minor compared to the threat he poses, though that is small enough,” the dragon said. “They can try to trace our operative, whether he succeeds or fails, but it will be chasing ghosts. In the time it would take to find us, our plans will come to fruition, and it will not matter what they know.”

“Yeah,” the Toxo Warrior said, “they all said that.” Then he threw a tarp over the head.

* * *

 

Carl and Dana ended up in bed, though they did nothing they had not done before. He had asked her if she wanted to, and she had answered, “No, but I want to know we could.”

Now, she lay next to him, wholly unclothed, shifting and twisting. Finally, Carl  asked, “What’s the matter?”

She looked at him and sighed. “I want you to tell me, about them,” she said. “Who were the Toxo Warriors? And what really happened?”

Carl sighed. “All right, I owe you that,” he said. “The thing is, nobody knows when they started. The first we knew about was burglaries, weird ones. It was chemicals and specialized lab equipment, things ordinary criminals wouldn’t know what to do with. They also stole from construction sites, even did some of their work there. The first fatalities we knew about was at one of those. A couple of them were old friends of Constructor’s. A week after that, they did the worst thing they ever did. It was a chemical plant that did work for the military, with over a hundred workers inside. They released a gas that killed 53 men outright. Another 9 died later, and a lot more got hurt. The thing is, they didn’t take anything. There really wasn’t anything worth taking. From what we know now, it was all over one chemical, not important, but it had a name that sounded like something else.”

“My God,” Dana said. Her voice was soft, almost uninflected.

Carl nodded. “That was what they were like. Smart, cunning, lucky as Hell, but very, very careless. Constructor said as soon as we heard about it, they had to be stopped. It took another month before we found them. They were at a construction site, like he thought, doing some kind of experiment in the unfinished building. They had built their own combat mech, and they rigged a booby trap that was a lot more dangerous, like that Poe story about the pendulum. It flattened me, literally. Constructor got through, past their gas, smashed the  mech, and pulled out the power cables for their experiment. They got away in good time, then they tried to drive off in a big dump truck that was on site. The only problem was, they turned the wrong way, right into their own booby trap. By then, Constructor had found the trigger, and he set it off. Something they were hauling caught fire, so we had to back off. A lot of people said they had to be dead. Constructor never believed it.”

He rolled onto his side to face Dana. “Things were quiet after that. It was two years before we got the trail, again. This time, it wasn’t just stealing things. They had hacked a few different companies, at least that was what the executives all said, and started funneling money and materials into a shell company. It was enough to build their own lab, with a good security system plus a few guards. We watched the place for a week before we found a back door. I wasn’t even sure it was them, but Constructor never doubted. We got in, and sure enough, it was them. Only, they got the drop on us. One of them had a gas canister, the other had a flame thrower that looked dangerous enough to hurt me. They could have killed us, but we were close to their experiment. Plus, the one doing the talking wanted to know if the Agency was on the way.”

He gazed into her eyes. “So, here’s what really happened. The one who had the flame thrower shifted to get a better aim. There was this backpack with a hose coming out. He bumped a little bottle on the shelf. It fell over and rolled off the shelf, into a bucket. Of water, as far as we ever knew.”

Dana covered her mouth. “What was it?”

Carl shook his head. “We didn’t know, we never knew. But like I told the convention crowd, we could see their eyes. We could tell, they knew they screwed up. They knew it was bad, very bad. They didn’t even try to fix it, they just ran. So did we. The rest…” He shook his head. “Like I said, the real investigators said nothing could have survived. They didn’t even mean alive, just… intact.”

Dana nodded. “Okay. Now, here’s the thing… You said they hired guards, right? So it wasn’t just the two working alone. Do you think someone else could have started over?”

Carl nodded, but then frowned. “The guards were caught and then cleared… most of them, at least,” he said. “They all said they were legitimate contractors who didn’t know what was going on. Of course, we never knew what they were doing either, so we couldn’t really argue. Some of them were probably clean, the rest would have been goons. Definitely not the kind to set off by themselves.”

Dana sat up, cinching the sheet around her. “What about those companies they stole from?” she said. “It doesn’t sound like they were really in the dark. I can tell you don’t think so.”

Carl shrugged. “If they did have anyone inside, it would have been mid-level, probably through a contractor,” he said. “We’d seen the same thing before and since. They weren’t as stable as the goons, and a lot less predictable. The usual common denominator was that they thought they deserved better than they got. There were a few who tried setting off on their own. The Raven might have started out that way; even with him in a body bag, they could never prove who he was. Still… I don’t see how anyone else could become the Toxo Warriors. Then again, whoever is out there is already doing things a bit different.”

Dana settled down again. “There’s one more thing,” she said. “’There’s something that man from the Agency knew, and you know, but neither of you said. He said the people they’re looking for stole a chemical that could hurt you. Except, that couldn’t be all, could it? So tell me, if you love me or you ever could… What would anyone be using that stuff for?”

Carl nodded again. “All right, you deserve to know,” he said. “Like Carter said, it’s a powerful acid. You could use it for etching, if you had to do very fine work, and it would double as a disinfectant. There’s really just one thing where you’d need both… and it’s manufacturing nanites.”

In the end, they did indeed do nothing they hadn’t done before, but they did no less. Afterward, when Dana was soundly and happily asleep, Carl rose. As he passed the kitchen window, he stopped and leaned back. From outside the window, two luminous discs throbbed, shifting from almost pink brightness to a dim blood-black that could have been put down to an afterimage created by a single lamp behind him. They were set in a barely visible silhouette, that only discernible when the light was dimmest, of a nearly circular head atop a neck and torso too subtly tapered to differentiate where one ended and the other began. It took a bare moment for Carl to take all of it in, and in that moment he snatched up a medium-sized knife from a pile of cutlery Dana had cleared out from a broken drawer. The next moment, the eyes flared brighter than before, so bright they seemed like one continuous band extending far to either side of the head. Then all that remained was indeed a lingering after image. Carl dropped the blade without moving an inch from where he stood. When he finally tried to do so, he had to look down before he realized that the knife had gone through his foot and into the floor.

 

And at that moment, not too far away, the Toxo Warrior who drove the truck hastily removed his gear. He climbed back in the truck, then drove up to a gate where he swiped a card to enter. A few minutes later, he made his way back to a car just a little more expensive than an ordinary worker could normally afford. When he looked up, there was not even a silhouette, only a gleam within the deeper darkness at the height of a human head. “I know you are,” a voice said. It was soft and oddly androgynous, without seeming mechanical. He showed no reaction as a figure emerged into the light, just far enough to reveal a figure clad entirely in black, complete with a nearly spherical helmet. “I want in.”