War Stories of a Supervillain, Chapter 2

Chapter 2 – The War Begins

The Titans of New York appeared to have better things to do than bother with one lone supervillain when I arrived at their base. OK, so they didn’t actually notice me when I arrived, because their building wasn’t air-tight, and I went in through the ventilation system. My having access to a teleporter was going to be public knowledge, but, so far, I had always managed to keep my ability to turn into mist from being known to anyone in the super community.

“Hey, babe. You didn’t start the party without me, right?”

So, there might have been a bit of consternation when I suddenly appeared behind Electra while she was speaking with Deadeye, a member of the Titans who had the power to… shoot anything. No, really, his powers made him an insane marksman with any kind of projectile or thrown weapons, along with some minor enhancements to his visual acuity. He could literally shoot the wings off a fly from twenty paces.

Anyway, when I appeared behind Electra in full costume and placed my hand on her waist, that caused Electra to yelp in shock, which was pretty cute, as well as literally letting off a small shock of electricity that would have been problematic if my suit didn’t have some basic insulation. Deadeye’s face took on a look of profound mischief, in that way that heralded teasing aplenty when the situation wasn’t quite so dire. Electra, however, whirled to face me, her shock turning into a bit of anger to cover the embarrassment.

“HOW THE HELL DID YOU GET IN HERE?”

I booped her on the nose with a finger, and said, “Wrong question, Electra. We’ll talk about that later.” Looking over to Deadeye, I said, “I dislike aliens thinking they can just come in and shoot up the place. The Earth is where I keep all my stuff, after all.”

Deadeye’s eyes glittered, though he tried to keep a serious face. “So, you going to try being a hero on this one? There are a lot of people who would prefer I try and arrest you right now.”

“Oh, I’m sure there are. But you’re not stupid enough to try that, while there are bigger fish to fry. Anyways, like I said, I dislike how these aliens do business. But I have a reputation to maintain. Now, if someone were to hire me to help out with the aliens, then, given the circumstances, I would be able to give a discounted rate, and they would get me teaching the aliens why you don’t go invading Earth. Under the circumstances, I’d say $1, plus whatever goodies I ‘appropriate’ from the aliens would be appropriate, don’t you think?”

“You CAN’T be serious!”

Deadeye ignored Electra’s outburst, and allowed his stern mask to drop, a boyish grin crossing his face. Reaching into a pocket of his costume, he pulled out his wallet, and made quite a production of extracting a single dollar bill. With exaggerated grace and ceremony, he offered the bill to me. “When can you start?”

I took the bill, smiling behind my mask as I did so, and slipped it into a pocket of my own costume. “Locally? As soon as they touch down someplace. For the ships in orbit? That’ll take a couple days. I’ve got an idea, but I have to gather materials first.”

“STOP IGNORING ME!”

“I sent a contact number to the Titans’ switchboard, and my personal number to Electra. I’ll be keeping watch over by the UN building. In the movies, the aliens always try to do shit at the UN building, right? If they land somewhere else in the tri-state area, give me a call, and I’ll be there.”

“Very well, good hunting, Iceblade.”

“To us all.”

“AAARGH!”

That’s when I turned to mist and flew off, out of the building, leaving Deadeye to deal with the slightly irate Electra. I spent the rest of that night lounging on the roof of the UN Headquarters, waiting for an invasion that never came. The aliens, apparently, had never watched the proper movies to know where they were supposed to land. Instead, twenty-four hours after the crippling bombardment, the world saw one of the massive, city-sized ships descend from the sky to land in the middle of the Amazon rain forest.

This, naturally, caused some consternation from the nations of the world. This consternation resulted in more than a few leaders pressing more than a few big red buttons that led to more than a few big ass missiles getting launched at the grounded ship, including a couple of the ICBM variety. Unfortunately, those attacks were simply too slow, and the ships in orbit shot them down, before unleashing a renewed bombardment on the places that had launched them.

Unwilling to risk what remained of their military strength, the countries stood down, but the Titans let me know that the Squadron Supreme was going to go and try to take out the ship in South America. Personally, I thought that was a horrible idea, while the rest of the ships were still up there. After all, ground forces tend to react badly to orbital bombardment. As long as the aliens had the high orbitals, the human race was fucked.

Thankfully, I had someone on my side who was able to get me to just the right place, where I could get my hands on all the lovely little toys that I would need in order to ‘persuade’ the aliens to back off. Once she and Matrix Mike had ensured that Chicago wasn’t going to get wiped out any time soon, Web Mistress returned to our lair, and began searching for the largest stockpile of toys she could find, along with whatever codes we might need to access them. As one might have expected, the most convenient stockpile for my uses was at Kirtland Air Force Base, outside Albuquerque, New Mexico.

As one may have expected, despite the Titans of New York deciding to (grudgingly) keep me in the loop about developments, no one was going to simply just let a supervillain stroll into an Air Force Base and go shopping. That meant I’d have to do a heist before I could start giving door prizes to the aliens. The only problem was that the US military had a very poor sense of humor when it came to you taking their toys to throw a party with. Especially with the toys I was after. They tended to react by shooting first, shooting second, shooting some more, reloading, and then shooting a bit more just for good measure, before even thinking about asking questions. They figured that, if you made it past the big signs saying in no uncertain terms that people past this point would get shot, then you knew what you were signing up for.

That attitude carried over into their security systems, as well as their guards. They were really quite paranoid about the whole thing. In fact, it was almost like they were afraid that supervillains would try to break in and steal their toys. I would comment about how silly the idea was, if I hadn’t been intending to do just that.

The first problem was the location. While it might have been an Air Force Base near a major US city, the area I needed to get to was surprisingly well defended from outside access. The toys were kept in an underground facility that was run by stand-alone systems. There was a secure landline running into the site, but it was studiously not tied to any of the internal systems. Even the internal phones used an isolated network of wires, so that phones connected to the outside were not connected to the rest of the base. The facility was also lead-lined and covered with reinforced concrete, making it damn near impervious to any kind of outside signal. Even Web Mistress couldn’t download the blueprints for the site, or get any information on personnel rosters.

The second problem was access. The facility was shielded against teleports of all kinds, and had active defenses designed to make things incredibly uncomfortable for anyone who managed to make it in. It was also climate controlled and could be hermetically sealed, which spelled all kinds of ‘bad news’ for people caught inside. In fact, the fire suppression system involved, quite literally, pumping all the air out of the facility, instantly removing any fire. Anyone who was inside would have a few seconds to find a breathing mask, or they’d suffocate.

The solution, such as it was, could be described as simplicity itself. I would simply break into the facility with Web Mistress at my side. I would take care of the physical defenses, while she eliminated the digital defenses, and erased all traces of our presence from the security systems.

It wasn’t the first time I took my sister on a heist, and no doubt wouldn’t be the last. However, it was not something we did, if we had a choice. We both knew our areas of expertise. The digital arena was hers to command, and I knew of none better than her. For fieldwork, though… well, I had tried to train her, and she had a decent enough foundation, but she was never going to be a front-line combatant.

In the dead of night, we teleported into the air a mile above the base. It was a common tactic I used. Facilities might be set up to detect teleports and sound an alarm, but few of them had a range of a mile. And very, very few people had sensors pointing straight up. With it being night, it would take a bit of phenomenal luck for someone to see us. Hand in hand, we freefell down towards the earth. Not wanting to frighten Web Mistress over much, since she didn’t practice this like I did, I turned us to mist two hundred feet above the ground, and floated us down the rest of the way.

We solidified in the shadow of the door to the underground facility. It was a big bastard of a door, solid steel and designed to hermetically seal. I stabbed Frozen Wind into the bottom of the door, piercing through it with the magic blade. No longer airtight, the door could not keep us out as I once more turned us to mist.

Inside the facility, we were able to flow up into the air vents. The vault where the toys we were after was hermetically sealed, with layers of security to keep anyone and anything from getting into it uninvited. A clerk’s office inside the facility was not, however. This clerk was utterly unimportant, with no actual access to any of the secure systems. What he did have, however, was a computer hooked up to the internal network.

It is part of Web Mistress’s powers that any codes automatically reveal themselves to her. Even military encryption is, in the end, code, sometimes multiple layers of code, with an incredibly difficult to break cypher. For my sister, military encryption and firewalls may as well be written in plain English. The moment we solidified in the room, she had already hacked the security camera and edited out our presence. Soon, we had the complete run of the facility, and no one knew.

Of course, that was just the security systems, cameras, and automatic alarms. If we encountered any of the guards or staff, then they could set off a manual alarm. Unless Web Mistress was in the system to prevent that, then the alarm would go out, and our job would be more difficult. Even if she was in the system to stop it, we would have to leave more evidence than a tiny mark in the exterior door to the facility, near ankle height, where I had stabbed the door. If it was weeks or months before someone realized I’d been shopping in the Air Force’s toy store, then that was fine by me.

As mist, we flew through the facility, until we reached the door we needed. We didn’t have the necessary key cards, fingerprints, and other things necessary to access the vault, but we didn’t need it. Web Mistress simply touched the vault’s controls, and the door opened, without even setting off the siren and flashing lights that usually went off when it was open. Closing the door behind us ensured that we would not be disturbed.

Inside this vault were stacked the toys I needed to send my message. I wasn’t greedy. There had to be over a hundred of the devices in just this vault, with more in other areas of the facility. I didn’t want to have to deal with ‘reactivating’ the devices, though, so I stuck with the ‘active’ ones. And I only took twenty of them, sliding them one by one into the dimensional pocket of my sword.

While the sensors designed to detect teleports were offline, I activated the teleporter, and brought us directly from the vault to my lair, minimizing our ‘footprint’ at the base. In a few minutes the sensors would go back to normal, and someone would have to look hard to spot the edits (including the looped camera footage) that Web Mistress had made to their readings covering the time we were in the facility. It was, all told, a perfect heist, with almost no evidence that it had ever happened, save the missing devices.

Web Mistress looked at me as she reconnected with the networks now that we were back in the lair. “Brother.” That tone wasn’t good. That was the tone of bad shit having happened.

“What happened?”

“The Squadron Supreme attacked the ship in the Amazon. It went like you said. Once they had taken everyone out, the aliens bombarded the site from orbit. Alchemy, Foxtrot, Titan, and Lucky Star are dead. Indomitable took it like you’d expect, but Lady Victory and Pyra are only alive because they were inside the ship, and avoided most of the blast.”

I sighed. I’d told the Titans that would be the likely outcome, but there wasn’t anything they could do to stop the Squadron. It was too bad. We were going to need as many fighters as we could get before this was over. Losing some of the most powerful right off the bat hurt.

I took a breath, willed my blood to ice, figuratively speaking. There would be time for emotion later. Now, it was time for vengeance. The aliens were going to learn about the human concept of a ‘vendetta’.

Twenty B61 tactical nuclear warheads should be a good way to introduce the concept to them, right?