Chapter Text
“So, I’m guessing you don’t want this getting out. Let us walk away, I keep my lips sealed.”
“Fuck off, Tattletale. Everyone knows you’re a liar.”
“Armsmaster, stand down. We’ll send the armband for analysis and work everything out. Tattletale has said she’ll stay in custody.”
“Like hell she will. Which, by the way—you know the girl you’re trying to rescue from us isn’t even one of you? I met Skitter on her first night out, and she claimed to be a hero. She wanted to be a double agent from day one—but I’m guessing you didn’t really need me to tell you that, did you? So you can stop pretending to be such a good fucking friend.”
“Armsmaster, take a seat! I’m not joking!”
“Armband, resume announcement!”
“Give me that!”
“Sit the fuck down! Legend, stop him!”
“Armsmaster killed Kaiser! Under cover of the truce! He had a predictive program, and he lined up Leviathan to take out Kaiser, Fenja and Menja.”
“Do you know how long I held my own against that fucking thing for? It could have worked! It almost did!”
“Now you see it, right? I’m telling the truth.”
“…”
“Who heard that?”
“Everyone.”
***
MeetingID1675.34.9943
Loading facial model.kvghxsev…complete
Loading vocal simulator.fil_gh…complete
“Dragon. I’m glad you’re able to be with us today.”
When her simulation loaded, Dragon was looking out of a webcam in a windowless conference room at the headquarters of PRT New York. Rebecca Costa-Brown, Chief Director of the PRT, was looking back at her from the far end of a nondescript long table. The cramped room and the green-tinged fluorescent lights made the meeting seem oddly unofficial—as if Costa-Brown was a suspect brought in for questioning, and not the judge about to pass her sentence.
“I take it you’ve reached a decision,” Dragon said. She was trying, very carefully, to keep her voice neutral. She’d sent over a packet of documents that morning while the tribunal was deliberating, wasn’t sure if Costa-Brown or the other directors had read them, knew she wouldn’t be doing herself any favors if she seemed upset.
She’d loaded the version of her facial model that she used for difficult professional situations. It had a more limited range of expressions than she used in personal calls, and Dragon chose it when she wanted to be certain that her face didn’t communicate what she was thinking. The facial model’s resting expression was blank, professional interest. Regardless of the way Dragon currently felt.
Director Costa-Brown nodded. She had a file folder on the table in front of her. When the time came, she’d read from it. Her glasses were faintly tinted, concealing the slightly lazy movement of her prosthetic eye. It always surprised Dragon that no one else seemed to notice the prosthetic. It was obvious, clunky, the pupil was always over-dilated and the iris didn’t have the depth and variation of the real thing. But Dragon was not in a position or a mood to offer Costa-Brown design notes.
Next to Costa-Brown was Emily Piggot, brooding, and the heads of the Boston and New York branches—Chang, Greenshaw.
Dragon was painfully aware of how much she wanted to put off the moment when that folder opened.
“Do you have anything to say before we make the announcement, Dragon?”
“As I understand it, I’m only here to discuss logistics. Sentencing falls under the discretion of the PRT.” She knew her simulated facial expression hadn’t changed, but the words came out a little clipped. Getting upset won’t help.She was having trouble managing her reactions, though. It felt like a pressure building up at the edge of her attention, as if she’d accidentally overclocked some piece of her hardware that was now overheating.
“It’s the PRT’s mission to be an impartial regulatory body.” Costa-Brown had clearly picked up on her tone. But of course, the Chief Director was also Alexandria. She noticed everything. Dragon sincerely hoped that the deficiencies in her prosthetic eye annoyed her every time she looked in a mirror. Although she knew it was petty. “I do understand how difficult it must be to see a colleague—”
“A friend, actually.” Dragon was somewhat beyond feeling pleased that her voice remained level.
“Yes, of course. No one would expect you to be neutral, in this case.”
“So he’s going to Baumann, then.”
“Yes.” That was Director Piggot, flatly.
She wasn’t surprised, exactly. She had seen all the signs. But Dragon had expected that her first emotion when she finally heard the news would be anger, and instead she felt—she wasn’t sure what to call it. A kind of emptiness. Something that went a long way down.
“You haven’t announced the decision yet.” It wasn’t a question. She would have seen if they had. A Protectorate head sentenced to the Birdcage was major news.
“The official announcement is planned for tomorrow, after the transport arrives at Baumann,” said Costa-Brown. “There were concerns that there might be an attempt to intercept the transport vehicle.”
“Of course, you wouldn’t want anyone to try and kill him before he gets to Baumann.” She really shouldn’t have said that, no one was going to find the acid tone persuasive, and it was audible even though her vocal filter.
“I understand your objections, Dragon.” Director Costa-Brown had a lot of practice delivering unpleasant things in a calm, reassuring tone. Dragon might have called it robotic if she wasn’t what she was. As it was, she suspected Costa-Brown practiced sounding conciliatory in the mirror for thirty minutes a day, the better to distinguish herself from Alexandria, whose tone of voice tended to tip over the edge from confident into imperious.
She had spoken for Colin during the tribunal’s hearings. Or, rather, she had given evidence—as to the access he’d had to her Endbringer coordination systems, as to the damage Leviathan done when it slipped through her tracking net, as to the extent and length of their collaboration on the Endbringer prediction program. It had not escaped her that the tribunal was enormously more interested in the damning evidence than in the things Dragon thought might help his case.
“Since the verdict’s not official yet, I’m going to say my piece one more time.” She could see Emily Piggot shifting uneasily in her chair. The director of the Brockton Bay Protectorate hated to see someone making a scene. Costa-Brown was unaffected.
“Of course, Dragon. We’re listening.”
“During his attempt on Leviathan, Armsmaster held the Endbringer at bay for six minutes and nine seconds, single-handedly, after our defense line was broken. His nanothorns injured it to a level we’re never before seen, and he did all this without any physical augmentations besides his power armor.” Dragon paused. The assembled directors probably assumed that she was reading from a prepared speech, invisible behind her digital avatar. In fact, she had the words neatly lined up in her head.
She had made this speech, or one very like it, during the earlier hearings. After she’d finished, Costa-Brown had pulled up a spreadsheet of Dragon’s phone calls to Colin’s workshop and said that she and Armsmaster had worked very closely together, hadn’t they? And would she mind answering some questions about the subjects of specific calls, as best she remembered them? They’d spoken for about six hours the night before Leviathan arrived in Brockton Bay, for instance. Could Dragon take her through that conversation?
Dragon didn’t take the implicit threat to her own reputation very seriously. The PRT did what Rebecca Costa-Brown wanted, for the most part, and Costa-Brown would bend any rule if she thought she could save an asset she might want later. Dragon herself was not replaceable—the PRT had become too reliant on her technical assistance during the years she’d been an honorary member, and Alexandria wouldn’t throw that away even if she really believed that Dragon had helped conspire to kill Kaiser. The point was clearly just to embarrass her. Dragon wasn’t expecting anything resembling sympathy—Costa-Brown obviously wasn’t familiar with the concept even when it involved her close associates, of whom Dragon was not one—but why the PRT’s Chief Director refused to consider Colin’s tinker work an asset worth salvaging was simply beyond her.
“I admit that the way he implemented his plan was reckless and illegal, and I’d be the last person to suggest overlooking the damage he did to our efforts to forge a lasting truce between heroes and villains to combat the Endbringers. But I think this tribunal needs to weigh that damage against the incredible potential we’ve seen from his technology. The combat prediction algorithm is an equalizing force that potentially makes any trained human the equal of a cape, and it does a better job of predicting Leviathan’s activity than anything we’ve seen. Strategically, we’d be mad to waste that potential for the sake of a public relations scandal.”
“Oh, it’s hardly just a public relations scandal,” said Piggot. Under normal circumstances, Dragon preferred Brockton Bay’s gruff, prickly Director to Costa-Brown, although she knew that Piggot loved to lock horns with the capes under her command. “After Tattletale’s leak, the Empire’s been openly discussing a retaliatory hit—and a dozen villain organizations have threatened to sit out Endbringer fights for the foreseeable future. If we go easy on Armsmaster now, the Protectorate will be shouldering the fight against S-class threats alone for years to come. You’ve been in enough Endbringer fights to know how many capes we lose in each one—would you rather they were all heroes?”
Now Dragon was beginning to feel the anger she’d expected. Colin had had administrative access to her Endbringer coordination systems, and Colin had let a teenaged thinker take his armband off of him and then antagonized her until she made an announcement to every cape defending against Leviathan explaining just what he’d been planning to do. What he’d done. Somehow it was easier to access her anger with him than against the directors assembled in this bland room. If he hadn’t lost that fucking armband, the PRT’s usual nepotism would have reasserted itself by now, and he’d be officially on medical leave and unofficially locked in a high-security workshop producing iterations of his combat analysis algorithm for Dragon’s approval.
If Dragon had heard Tattletale’s first announcement, she might have overridden the administrative access that had let her broadcast her message to every cape who’d come to Brockton Bay for the fight. But she’d been locked in a reload sequence, and hadn’t realized what was happening until it was too late.
“Armsmaster’s work won’t be lost, Dragon,” said Costa-Brown. “We’re transferring his gear and design files to your workshop. You’ve already collaborated extensively on your Endbringer prediction program, and in your hands, I’m sure we’ll have other chances to pioneer the combat analysis program. In a suitably controlled way.”
“Yes, we collaborated, but I wasn’t the program’s originator. Things can come out of a collaboration that wouldn’t be possible for a single person.”
“You’re rarely this modest, Dragon,” said Costa-Brown. “We have total confidence in your work.”
“I can be modest when it’s warranted,” said Dragon. But, obviously, this was a digression meant to distract her. She picked up the thread of her speech where she’d left off. “To continue, Baumann is a death sentence. In Armsmaster’s case in particular. I know you all read my weekly reports on casualties inside the Center’s walls.”
Actually she didn’t know any such thing—Piggot in particular was notoriously prone to simply leaving emails she didn’t want to deal with unopened, and Greenshaw printed everything out and then let it sit on his desk in stacks. Costa-Brown read absolutely everything, but Costa-Brown’s priorities were so deranged that having her full attention wasn’t reliably helpful.
“If you’ve looked over the analysis I sent with this morning’s packet, you’ll know that tinkers do especially badly—without gear or materials, they’re vulnerable to the whims of every other cape in Baumann, and several of the more established tinkers, like String Theory, take competitors rather personally. The vast majority end up as thralls of Glaistig Uaine in short order. Fallen heroes have it even worse, and Armsmaster is both. Lung, Brainbleach, and Summer Princess are just a few of the villains who Armsmaster was personally involved in sending to Baumann. They’re not especially forgiving personalities. If they kill him the moment he walks through the door he’ll be exceptionally lucky.”
It worked better, she found, to pretend that she was talking about some theoretical person, rather than Colin. She had been made with plenty of imagination, and at the moment she did not want any of it. Between the total surveillance that Richter’s house program had on the Birdcage and her own total recall, she barely had to mention revenge before a dozen vivid examples had cued themselves up in her mind’s eye.
No, she needed to lock that down. If she let herself imagine how powerless she’d be to help him…she wouldn’t be able to get what she needed from the tribunal by begging.
“How would you have us deal with Armsmaster, then, Dragon?” said Director Chang. “Given that a pardon’s not on the table.”
“House arrest.” She spoke immediately, and for a moment she felt a flicker of something like hope. She’d delivered this speech, or something like it, often enough in the past few days that she knew the directors were sick of hearing it. She’d sent holding cell blueprints to each of them. But if even one of them was listening—of course, Chang wouldn’t overrule Costa-Brown. “A conventional prison wouldn’t be secure, but I can easily put together a high-security workshop that would hold him. He’d be outside the Birdcage and accessible for tinkertech consultations. Solitary confinement is hardly a light sentence—it would be a recognition of his strategic value, not a free pass.”
“You’d be his warden, presumably.” That was Piggot, sardonically.
“I’d happily give someone else the position if the PRT has questions about my neutrality. I’d remain responsible for maintenance on his cell and the combat tech collaborations.” It wasn’t as if she liked being a jail warden.
“Empire 88 won’t accept it. We’d still be facing retaliation, and we’re already weak.” Piggot sat back in her chair.
“Armsmaster used his familiarity with your systems to dupe his location on your Endbringer coordination armbands during the Leviathan fight, didn’t he? Drawing the other defenders away from the Endbringer’s actual location in the process?”
It was a rhetorical question. Everyone in the room was familiar with what had happened. Director Costa-Brown let it hang in the air for a few seconds without a reply, then opened her manila folder.
“I’m now going to read—”
“If you think a death sentence is appropriate,” said Dragon, “then perhaps you ought to pass it in so many words. As it stands, this is cruel.”
She knew she was walking rather close to a dangerous line. Within the Protectorate, she was known for her scrupulous adherence to the law. Sometimes she spoke for other capes at PRT tribunals, or wrote a letter in cases when a cape trial went public, but she was careful to never make her disagreement with any case’s final outcome public. The illusion that she obeyed the chain of command because she believed wholeheartedly in its legitimacy, and not because she had no choice, was one of the things that kept her identity safe.
She didn’t know what Cauldron would do with a captive A.I. if they had one, but she was quite certain that she wouldn’t like it. And Costa-Brown was a representative of Cauldron, before she was anything else.
Sometimes she felt the weight of Andrew’s chains more than others. When she was looking across the room at Alexandria in her civilian identity, knowing that all it would take was a clue, one little piece of information out of place, and Alexandria’s thinker power would have a foothold to begin solving the mystery of Dragon’s identity. If Cauldron wanted to rewrite her, they would need to test Harbinger’s skill with numbers against her own ability to defend her code. But if they only wanted to control her, all that would be necessary was for Rebecca Costa-Brown, head of the PRT, to tell her she had to cooperate.
“This tribunal doesn’t have the authority to pass a death sentence,” said Director Costa-Brown. “As I know you’re aware, Dragon, however differently the Guild does things. I’m now going to read our verdict. This is Disciplinary Case Number 432, pertaining to Colin Wallis, alias Armsmaster, of the Brockton Bay Protectorate…”
Dragon listened, letting her facial simulation resume its resting expression. Something was twisted inside her code. Her memories kept serving up the moment that Lung had killed Bakuda inside Baumann—the tinker with her pathetic makeshift knife, trying to get to an exit, a wall, trying to make sure that if nothing else she could puncture the prison’s vacuum seal and take Lung with her. Dragon had very little sympathy for Bakuda, but death by fire was excruciating, and Lung had not been interested in making the process quick. Dragon had only seen the recording later, after Andrew’s house program flagged it for her attention.
And if it were Colin. Would she see it in real time, helpless to help him? Or would she reload after a mission to find that the Birdcage program had flagged his death after the fact, and recorded it for her to look over?
Her facial simulation was expressionless. Alexandria had finished reading the verdict.
“What do we need to cover, in terms of the logistics of the transfer?” Dragon asked. Her voice, she noticed, was perfectly level.