CHAPTER 6 - FISHER

Pavel Fisher hated mysteries. Years ago, Mark would’ve said it was because they upset his view of the world—this idea that there were things happening out there that didn’t involve him, that there was knowledge out there he didn’t possess. Maybe he was right. But that was a long time ago, and the old habits of an old man died particularly hard.

He hadn’t even been on Asclepion an hour before finding one. He’d touched down, hired a car, and been wondering whether to head straight for his hotel or find out whether there was a single all-night pierogi place somewhere in the city. It wasn’t like he had gone looking for this mystery. This time, it had come to him.

The mystery came hot on the heels of a set of APD squad cars, screaming into the night with lights blazing. He’d pulled a quick u-turn and followed them, telling himself that it was, after all, why he was on the island in the first place.

Now, some ten minutes later and half a block away from the crime scene, he was watching the red and blue strobes play over the Dynazon industrial complex in front of him. People moved here and there, and Fisher was pretty sure that two of them were capes. So, that was another mystery—what the hell were Asclepion’s laziest stewards doing all the way out here?

Years ago, things had been different. Hell, he’d been different. Back then, the sight of an empowered crime scene would’ve filled him with... something. Excitement, perhaps. Maybe anticipation. The thrill of the hunt, even, if he’d wanted to be poetic.

But these days, it just made him vaguely annoyed.

“Watch the car for me,” he told Octopus, and hopped out.

He advanced towards the light. Several uniformed APD officers had already cordoned off the complex and, beyond them, power-armored members of the ELE prowled through the dark, seeking any hint of who might’ve been responsible. One of the uniformed officers glanced in his direction, moved to intercept him.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Maybe,” Fisher said. “But probably not. Not if you can’t tell me what happened here.”

The officer frowned. “Sir, this is a crime scene, and we’re not sure it is secure. I’m going to need to see some identification, or I’m going to need you to move on.”

How irritating the young were. Fisher reached into his pockets, found his lighter and cigarettes, and lit up. He made sure that the officer could see his hands—limbs of metal and plastic, artificial from the wrists down.

“Consider that my ID,” he said.

The officer set his hand on the butt of his stun baton. “In that case, I need to ask you to leave.”

Fisher took a drag, exhaled the smoke. “Then ask me to leave, kid.”

The officer’s hand tightened around his baton. What was he going to do, hit him?

A woman’s voice broke the stand-off. “What seems to be the problem here, Sergeant?”

And here came one of the mysteries. It was always nice when they came to meet him. The woman striding over towards him wore blue-and-green armorweave, with an angular motif that was supposed to evoke coral. Great Barrier, the leader of the Australian garrison. He’d read up on her on the flight over.

Christ above, Fisher thought. The goddamn names...

“Just a belligerent bystander, ma’am,” the officer said.

Great Barrier, her eyes hidden behind a simple mask, looked Fisher up and down.

“It’s fine,” she said. “Return to your duties.”

The officer wandered away.

“Well,” Fisher said. “Fancy seeing you out here.”

“What’re you doing here?”

Fisher affected a shrug. “I was just in the area. You know, I don’t think there’s a decent pierogi place on this island? I saw the commotion and figured I might find out what was going on.”

It was almost the truth. If the Australians were out here, then Fisher wanted to know why. They’d taken to their job of securing Asclepion like a bull in a china shop. Or a dingo in a maternity ward. Fisher hadn’t ever been good with metaphors, but one of the two seemed to fit. And you didn’t need to be metacognate to see the connection between the Dynazon refugee boat and whatever had happened at this facility.

“Identification, please.”

Fisher fetched it out of his pocket, handed it over. Barrier examined it, checked it against the computer in the arm of her suit, handed it back.

“Well, you won’t find much,” she said. “Looks like a smash grab.”

“Must’ve been really something if it rated an actual response from two of Star Patrol’s finest.”

“We were on patrol,” Barrier replied. “And we weren’t the first capes on the scene.”

What a thing to admit. Well, he had his first answer, and it was positively pedestrian. When the corporations got hit, the occupying force actually had to do its job. But frustratingly, it led to-

“Then who was?”

Barrier glanced over her shoulder. There, Fisher caught an outline of a hooded figure in all black. Huge jetboots. A newbie going for the edgy protector look. Some things never changed.

“Goes by Revenant,” Barrier said. “No registration in the IESA database. She apprehended the two perps, but they’re not saying anything. Dynazon’s asked us not to charge her for the skylight, or to fine her for being unregistered. So, we’re letting her off with a warning.”

Sure, Fisher thought. That, and it’s easier to not file the paperwork.

But all he said was, “Huh,” and snuffed his cigarette out between his artificial fingers, and then crushed it under his heel. Disgusting habit, anyway.

“Lucky them,” he said. “Wanna tell me why someone hits a Dynazon factory?”

“Like I said, it’s looking like a smash and grab.”

“I’m here on behalf of the company,” Fisher said. “Got hired to investigate the attack on the Adriatic. Do you think there’s a connection here?”

“It’s difficult to say at this time,” Barrier said. “We’ll need time to actually run the investigation.”

“That’s all you’ve got? Jesus. How many of you are here again? Seven or eight? Have you considered, maybe, some preemptive work? Y’know, get ahead of the bad guys?”

Great Barrier’s lips pressed into a thin line.

“That’s not why we’re here,” she said.

“No doubt. Well, got any clue what we’re dealing with here?”

“‘We?’”

“One of us will do our job,” Fisher said. Even if it’s welfare for an old, crippled cape. “So, humor me.”

She fixed him with a look. “What’re you doing here, Fisher?”

Again, Fisher affected a shrug. “I’m still registered in the IESA database. Active, too, last I was aware.”

Barrier looked him up and down. Fisher knew he didn’t look it, but that was the point. Slacks, jacket, dress shoes. Scars.

“You know the rules,” she said. “If you’re going to be on duty, you do it in your uniform.”

“This uniform makes me less of a target,” he replied. “You should try the private sector, Barrier. Better pay for one, and you don’t have a big neon sign painted on your ass.”

Fisher had been a target once, had worn the bright colors once. He’d paid the price for it, too. Never again.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Whatever you say,” Barrier said. “We’re not all Sentinel, you understand. Some of us are trying to hold the world together. We’re doing the best we can.”

Ah, Sentinel. Asclepion’s last great cape. He hadn’t needed to read the files to be familiar with him, the warrior-scion of the architect-king Demigod. But Sentinel was no leader and the institutional rot had become so ingrained that the only cure had been to burn it to the root and bring in a team from Australia. And all they’d done was make things worse.

The best we can. It was like the operative phrase of all well-meaning individuals everywhere, ever since the world had gone to shit. Maybe Asclepion had been a utopia. Maybe. But it never had been, not whenever Fisher had seen it, at least.

“Sure thing,” he said.

There was still some kinship between Great Barrier and him, however. She was part of the new generation, with her classes and academies, and he was an old hero who had blazed the trail. Maybe she knew he was right. Not for the first time, Fisher wondered how things could’ve been different.

“Well, you said this was a smash and grab—what’d they grab?”

Barrier was silent for a moment, and then replied, “At this time, the only thing that’s missing from the inventory is a single fusion cell.”

“The only thing that’s missing?”

“The two people we apprehended don’t have it on them.”

“Hmm,” Fisher murmured, considering that. Something was off about that.

“This seems like an old school cred job,” Fisher said. “Hit a target just to get noticed. I’ve heard Asclepion has a heavy empowered gang presence—these two associated?”

“One of them, yes,” Barrier replied. “Anatole Bryce. He runs with the Forgotten. They’re a low-intensity outfit, good for stability.”

“Cred or credits,” Fisher said, nodding to Great Barrier, but his mind was elsewhere. Working through facts to assemble possibilities. It might’ve not been the primary aspect of his old line of work, but basic detective skills were something you had to go out of your way to not pick up when you were a cape.

It wasn’t adding up. Fisher wondered if Great Barrier saw it, or if she cared. “Barrier, I think you’re missing someone.”

“Perhaps,” she replied. “But Bryce and his friend won’t say a word, and Revenant claims they were the only ones present.”

“Fine,” Fisher said, and let his mind work. If Bryce and his associate didn’t have the cell, then there were a few likely possibilities. One, that this Revenant was in on it. Two, they’d stashed it somewhere, and no one had found it. Three, inventory error. Or four, there was someone they weren’t accounting for.

But that didn’t add up either. Yes, a fusion cell was small and valuable. Yes, a lot of people would pay a decent chunk of change for one. But they weren’t exactly hen’s teeth, either. And, if they were so small and valuable, then why would this unknown thief go to all this trouble and only take the one?

Unless... Fisher thought. Unless they weren’t looking to sell it. Unless they were looking to use it.

“But for what?”

“Excuse me?” Barrier asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just thinking out loud. Old habits, you know how it is. Look, do you mind if I take a look around?”

“You’ve got clearance,” Barrier said. “I can’t stop you.”

“Thanks,” Fisher said, and stepped past her.

“How long are you going to keep this up, Pavel?” Barrier asked his back. “You’re not the only cape to get crippled in the line of duty. But you know that we’re the only people who can put the world right. Last I heard, you’d walked away from all this.”

She swept her arm to gesture to the factory, to the rest of Asclepion. Maybe to the rest of the world that lay beyond the island.

“Yeah,” Fisher replied, pausing. “Guess I did. I kind of got tired of the whole nobility thing a few years ago. Lost my interest in making the world right after that. Don’t think it can be done. Not like this, really.”

“Yet here you are. You used to be a good hero once, Impel.”

“Bit of an oxymoron there. Look, I’ve got a scene to case.”

Barrier just shook her head. “Look, just don’t make my job any harder than it has to be, okay?”

Fisher shoved his hands in his pockets, calling over his shoulder, “Abacus.”

“What?”

“You can count on it.”

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There wasn’t much to see in the factory. Fisher wandered the halls, poked around. Everything verified what Great Barrier had said. A broken skylight and a missing power cell. APD had already ferried the two suspects to the nearest station, where they’d probably end up back on the streets. Revenant disappeared before Fisher had a chance to track her down.

It was entirely possible that there wasn’t any connection. If Bryce ran with a local gang, then he wasn’t part of the mercenary group that had hit the Adriatic. Maybe these Forgotten had just sensed blood in the water, and decided to take what they could get before Dynazon secured itself better.

Fisher shook his head and banished the sharks. No ocean metaphors, no sea creatures. It was bad enough that he had to smell the goddamn ocean while he was here. How stupid was he to take a job on an island?

He was just on the way out when his eyes caught something on the far wall in the factory data center. Someone had spray painted something over Dynazon’s logo, the suncog. Something bright red, with harsh lines that suggested a skull and sweeping horns.

It was horrifyingly familiar. Fisher shivered and kept moving. Told himself it was nothing but pareidolia. A trick of the brain, a side effect of evolution. A mind looking for connections and, being dissatisfied with not finding any, had resorted to manufacturing them.

She wasn’t here. She couldn’t be.

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On the way to his hotel, Fisher reflected. Asclepion had a way of chewing up heroes and spitting them out. A long line of them, in fact, stretching all the way back to the founder of the city—Demigod himself. Sentinel, too, perhaps. Maybe that was why Fisher had ended up there. A sympathy for lost causes and old wreckage.

It went back before the Golden Age, too. The island city-state occupied an area that had once been called the “spacecraft graveyard,” back when humanity still had its eyes on the stars. He felt a certain sympathy for the years of scuttled spacecraft beneath the waves. No one came to Asclepion of their own free will, Fisher knew—you just ended up there.

The Australian capes knew it, too. And they knew they could buck the trend by not being caught anywhere near the teeth. They weren’t heroes, but stewards. Custodians of a decaying island in the most inaccessible spot in the world until someone—anyone—figured out what to do with it. What had such a promising recruit like Great Barrier done to get assigned here?

It didn’t matter. No one cared. And now, bad guys were getting brazen enough to strike corporations and refugee ships. And what was worse was that they were getting away with it. Whoever was behind it would grow bolder, and soon.

Was it a prelude to something greater? Maybe. But it didn’t feel right, either. There’d been no messages, no demands—nothing one could use to build street cred. And even she would’ve balked at hitting a refugee ship. Whoever was responsible, they weren’t anyone known to the APD, nor did they want to make a name for themselves.

So, who would be brazen enough to hit a corporation as rich as Dynamic Horizons and yet make off with only a single fusion cell?

Something wasn’t adding up. Fisher poked at it like a loose tooth. Annoyed by the discomfort, and somewhat worried that it’d fall out and grant a revelation. As he pulled up at the Elysium Arms hotel, Fisher still wasn’t sure about the why of it. It bothered him. Mysteries were anathema.

His hotel was in downtown Asclepion’s Theta Block, part of the metropolitan inner ring of the city. With its glass towers, bright lights and neoclassical stylings, it was like he could see the dream that Demigod had hoped for—a model for the future, a shining Golden Age beacon.

But the dream of the Golden Age was dead, and Fisher had seen its demise first-hand. The best humanity could do with the tools of utopia was a decade. God, he needed a drink...

He let Octopus out of his cat carrier, fed him (actual mince, none of that synthetic crap), and took stock of his room. It was the kind of hotel he could stay in only because he wasn’t paying for it. He wondered if they’d charge extra if he got cat hair everywhere.

Fisher took a beer out of the bar fridge. Figured he should cook something. But Mark had always handled that side of things. Mark was always-

No, he couldn’t think about that. Had to think about anything except that. He stepped out onto the balcony, listening to the sounds of the city.

What Fisher liked about his balcony was that it faced towards the center of the city, away from the ocean. No matter where he looked, there was the cityscape. Asclepion’s Citadel, the seat of empowered authority, dominated the skyline. It was tall enough and central enough that everyone said it could be seen from any part of the island.

Fisher snorted. Generations of people growing up with Asclepion’s problems, and every night they could look up and see that tower. Couldn’t be anything less than a big silver middle finger staring back at them. A regular Tower of Babel if Fisher had ever seen one.

The truth was, the world needed someone to save it, and still did. Years ago, Fisher had thought that the particular someone could be—would be—him. He could just head out in any direction and find someone and fix something, and that would be that. Everything would just fall into place if he just obeyed the call of the Golden Age hero. For a time, it’d been enough for him. Enough for the world.

But he’d had powers then. Hell, he’d had Mark, then.

Fisher finished his beer, held it out over the edge of the balcony, and let it drop. He didn’t so much see or hear it shatter as he knew that it’d inevitably happened from the fact that he had let go of it. Action and reaction, choice and consequence.

Problem is, you never know you’ve made the wrong choice until it happens.

He let his eyes wander around the streets below. Something was happening in the city, somewhere in the shadows. Not even the lights of the skyline could dispel that feeling. There was always a calm before the storm. A brief moment in time where Fisher felt he could see the hands moving in the shadows, arranging all their pieces on the board.

Somewhere in his mind, or perhaps his memories, Mark scoffed: always so dramatic, Pavel...

Years of service to the greater good, to the world, and what did he have to show for it? Nothing beyond a pair of artificial hands and an empty apartment on the other side of the world. What the hell was he doing, treating this job seriously? It was a pity job, a way for Asadi to feel good about himself. Impel was dead. He had to let it go.

He had to let everything go. He had to be satisfied with letting the Australian capes fuck everything up, miss the obvious, be content with throwing their hands up and shrugging at the state of things. With them missing the fact that this was all a prelude, that the shadows in the city were deepening, that mysteries always meant complications...

Fisher sighed. The call of the hero had taken too much from him, and it had never been more inviting than when it looked like someone else was screwing something up. But at this point, even with that thought, even with everything he had seen, the call had stopped being anything but a siren’s song.

Fisher listened to the call for three more seconds, and then stepped inside and shut the door on it.

Serving the public good had killed Impel. Pavel Fisher wouldn’t let it kill him, too.