The Adventures of Sidekick Carl, Part 17!

 It's my day off, so I polished off another installment of Sidekick Carl and the Nine-Foot Woman, with more world-building nobody asked for. As usual, here's the links for the first and previous installments.

The stage could have been at any convention center. Around the edges were tables for a banquet, and in the center was a round table with seats for a guest of honor. Audrey sat to one side, her golden pelt vibrant. On the stage, her two mates danced and sang karaoke to a song titled “Heartbeat”.  The one with the red pelt sang the verses, made even raunchier that the original, while her piebald mate pranced and leaped, at least twice his 3-foot height. They sang together on the chorus, which had been replaced with the refrain, “AUDREY!” As they sang her name, they descended from the stage back to her side. The crowd laughed and cheered, while Audrey herself literally sank down in embarrassment, her pointed ears flattened in embarrassment. The camera closed in, and it became clear she was quivering with stifled laugher.

Carl paused the video as Dana entered. She gave a smile as she slid in beside him on the dinette. “She hates that song,” he said. He pushed play. Then the camera followed the piebald mate through a backflip that carried him all the way back to the stage.

* * *

 

The figure could have been considered beautiful; there was no longer any question that it was female. She was tall, slender and very pale, with the beginnings of dark hair coming out of her scalp. Her body was encased in a form-fitting suit, that wasn’t quite transparent. John Carter showed no embarrassment as he examined her in full view of his wife. “It’s been two weeks,” he said. “Has she said anything?”

 

“Nothing of consequence,” Lauren said. “We have her ID, of course, not 100% but there’s no real doubt. We learned a little more. We tried telling her what we knew. She didn’t deny anything.”

“Don’t worry about that,” John Carter said. “What have you learned about her capabilities?”

 

“Without the suit we pulled her out of, nothing we can’t deal with,” she said. “Unusually dense muscle tissue with likely nanomotor enhancement, probably no more than 10 times baseline. Heavily enhanced bone structure, mostly where her immune system would have been. There’s a sort of drill in her right pointer finger we haven’t found a way to deactivate without taking the finger off, probably a few more surprises.”

“Can she escape?”

“The holding cell is a Grade 5 clean room,” Lauren said. “The real question is whether she’d survive if we let her out.”

John nodded, but frowned. “But that’s still not the real problem, is it?” he mused. “She came in with a plan that should have had no chance of working, and that’s par for the course. But then her chances of getting out were even worse… and she just didn’t care.”

Lauren smiled. “Do you think she’s waiting for someone to break her out?”

He frowned again. “No. It’s more like… like…” He looked at his wife, and said what he knew she could have told him herself.  “She feels safer here than anywhere else.”

* * *

The RV screen showed Audrey in a hospital room with her mates. The piebald mate waved from his hospital bed with a mechanical arm. “He might have regenerated the arm,” she said, “but there was too much cauterization from the plasma bolt.” The call went on with what was small talk for her and Carl. Then there was a call from Hombre Acero, who proved more subdued than his public persona yet still outgoing and talkative. At a cautious mention of the assassin who had killed one of his successors, he only shook his head and spoke of something else.

At the end of the calls, Carl turned back to Dana. “I’m really sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be,” Dana said. “I accepted the risks when we got together. So did you.”

The RV was in a wilderness area 1500 miles from the convention center where they had married. They had spent their honeymoon moving from place to place. There was no illusion that they remained incognito to the Agency, though John Carter insisted that there was no tracking device on the vehicle. It was about an hour later when he knocked at the door. He went straight to the latest information on the assassin.

“Her name is Jennifer Hartnell,” Carter said. “She was a researcher working on Spontaneous Immune Failure; picked up the virus that caused it in a lab accident. She had also worked with Dr. Hydro when he was still on the grid. There were rumors they were more than colleagues, but you know what the Doctor was like. She disappeared 15 years ago. It was ruled a likely suicide.”

Carl nodded. “Constructor knew about her,” he said. “He thought he might have kidnapped her. Now that I think about it, I wonder if he connected Borgus to Dr. Hydro. Is it his tech?”

“Yes,” Carter said. “There’s no question at all, though some of what we found was different or even improved. The core is the same, nanites inside a human host, protected by an airtight suit. In most ways, it’s intermediate between Dr. Hydro’s exosuit and your gear.”

“I heard she killed an Hombre Acero,” Dana cut in. “What happened there?”

Carter shook his head. “The one she fought was only in the armor because of what happened to the first two,” he said. “He only had limited training, and he was already sidelined for his temper. When she hijacked a ship with volatile cargo, he went out while we were still weighing our options. We still don’t know exactly what happened, but something lit up the cargo, and the whole ship blew in half. Odds are, it was the Hombre who made the mistake.”

“What about the Toxo Warriors?” Dana said.

Carter shook his head. “Still nothing,” he said. “For all we know, they might not have been involved at all. Not that I believe it.”

“Well,” Carl said, “at least you only needed a Class 5 team.”

“Oh, what we had was a Class 4 response at best,” Carter said. “We just got lucky.”

“Wait a minute,” Dana said. “What do you mean by `response’?” She gave a deeper frown. “You don’t really talk about the `Class’ thing, do you? So what does it really mean?”

Carter looked at Carl, then laughed. “Do you want to explain, or should I?” he said. Carl just shrugged. “Well, here’s the thing. We really don’t have a classification system, as such. Just think of the variety, and you’ll see why. There’s the Toxo Warriors, there’s the Hombres Aceros, there’s Tall People like you, there’s Basiliskus, Dr. Hydro, Captain Thunder, goddamn Abl C’Doen, and what do you really have in common? Nothing.  The only useful standard is what it would take to stop you.”

He reopened a laptop and opened up a chart. “Classes 1 to 3, even 4 are pretty much high normal,” he said. “They might be smarter, stronger, or just hear voices in their head that are usually right. Still, they can be met one-on-one or even defeated hand to hand, with skill and a lot of luck.  Class 5 is where things get harder. It really means multiple abnormalities, like strength and a healing factor. They can be defeated, especially by an attack in great numbers, but it’s a lot harder. At Class 6, it takes a paramilitary team with heavy weapons to do real damage. That’s where Constructor was rated, but he was really more like 5 or even the high end of Class 4. By Class 7, even that won’t do much good if you can’t find a magic-bullet weakness. That’s where most of the heavy hitters leveled off, including Basiliskus and Captain Thunder. Class 8, you could still probably kill them with conventional weapons, but the kind that would level a good chunk of a city. By the way, that’s where we put Dr. Hydro and Carl.”

Dana gasped and turned to Carl. “They put you 2 classes higher than Constructor?”

“Yeah,” Carl said reluctantly, “but only because of how hard it is to kill me.”

“That’s enough to put you high on our index, believe me,” Carter said. “Most places in the world, you could walk in and make people take orders by the time they ran out of ammo. You’re just too nice a guy to try it.”

Dana turned back to Carter. “Are there higher classes?” she pressed.

“You bet,” the agent said. “But it’s mostly theoretical, or hypothetical. By Class 9, you’re in gods and demons territory. Galaxarian got the rating, Gravatar came close. Look at the old stories of the demigods, and you’ll have the type. Nearly invulnerable, ageless, but still enough in our world to be seen and touched. At class 10, even that’s not a given; you’re dealing with interdimensional, paranormal, what have you. The only confirmed example is Abl C’Doen. They would be no different from a Class 1’s hallucinations, if we didn’t have sightings by multiple people at once.”

He sighed. “What we can’t take into account is personality. The supervillains that were Class 8 and up mostly just got themselves killed before Carl got started. They were powerful enough to take on the world, except they never waited to make their move. But the Toxo Warriors were barely at the threshold between 1 and 2, and we barely managed to prove they exist. Then with Constructor, the biggest real strength he had was that he didn’t look like a superhuman. I’m sure Carl could tell you, how many times people were looking for him and then just walked right past him. And when you get up to 9 and up, the real question is if they want to be found. You either have a demigod fighting an armor division in the suburbs of Old DC, or you’ve got myths, legends and ghosts nobody can pin down. Almost all the leads we ever ran down were like that, stories from far away and long ago. Most of them turned out to be mid-class superhumans who went native, if we could find them at all.”

Carl nodded, then asked cautiously, “Do you think there’s a chance C’Doen could come back?”

Carter just laughed. “The one good thing about `him’, he started at the top. If he does turn up, we’ll know.” Carl nodded again, and managed a laugh.

Just then, the video phone uplink rang. When the picture came up, it showed Dana, looking mildly surprised. “Carl!” she said. “I’m so glad I got through! Oh, and John? Well, I guess this is for you, too…”

They exchanged peasantries while she composed herself. It was still bare minutes before she got to her point. “’I just found out something new,” she said. “I really should have a long ago, but I never took the time because, well, it didn’t seem important.” She took another breath, and said, “I know who the Toxo Warriors were.”