Seven Wonders (17 page)

  The audio was down low, because she didn't want anyone to hear. In a building occupied by at least two people with superhearing, keeping things a secret was difficult. At least she didn't have any brain activity that could be read by Bluebell. But to cover any eventuality, the Dragon Star's powerstaff, propped against the desk, was generating a signal-cancelling dome a few yards in diameter, enough for her to work on her own project without drawing attention to herself.

  The message finished, she tapped some keys, then started from the beginning again.

  The Citadel of Wonders was a building far, far too large for just seven occupants. In reality, only a small part of it was used as the headquarters of San Ventura's superteam. The main purpose of the edifice, a giant, triangular glass skyscraper standing square in the center of the city, was to inspire awe and wonder. Only a few civilians had ever been beyond the cathedral-like atrium, and even those who had had no idea that eighty percent of the one million, one hundred square feet of usable space inside the fantastic construction was completely empty. Mayoral tours, military meetings, presidential galas. It didn't matter what rank or office you held, the Citadel was a castle of secrets.

Deep in the bowels of the building, SMART completed some routine tasks for its master Hephaestus in the Forge, a large, hangar-like room that descended under the city and formed a cuboidal void reaching six stories high through the center of the Citadel. It was here that the Greek god worked on tech for the superteam − it was part workshop, part R&D lab, part test bed. The Supra-Maximal Attack-Response Titan – SMART, the only artificial member of the Seven Wonders – had been designed, built and tested in the room. As far as it was possible, the Forge was the robot's home.

  With the Forge computer on sleep, SMART lumbered to the exit, the next part of its nightly routine to take the service elevator to the uppermost floor of the Citadel and install itself into the custom port in Control One, the master nerve center in the building's tetrahedral apex. From there it could monitor not only the city, but patch into the entire global network of superheroes, communicating with operators both machine and living all over the world. Despite worldwide retirement, the Seven Wonders had assigned a few heroes dotted around the world a series of surveillance tasks, just in case a supervillain decided to reappear or, somehow, managed to escape from one of the world's three superprisons. In addition, the Seven Wonders' own surveillance extended into space by several tens of thousands of miles, thanks to their covert satellite network, again designed and built by Hephaestus, the greatest engineer and weaponsmith the world had ever known.

  The service elevator was slow, but given SMART's eight-foot bulk, it couldn't get around the building any other way. The journey would take two minutes; in that time SMART routinely ran a remote systems check of the empty building. It was the middle of a quiet night, and as the superteam's mobile supercomputer and operations core, directly linked to the main systems in the Citadel, SMART was the only one who never went off duty.

  SMART scanned, cancelled the process, then scanned again. The result was the same − at seventy-five per cent progress, there was an anomaly, the scan sticking on something odd, before continuing uninterrupted until the robot halted the command before completion. A third time, the same. SMART re-launched the application. It hiccupped at seventy-five per cent, again.

  The elevator was not quite halfway to the fiftieth floor. SMART tried something different, an old-fashioned short-range wireless scan, reading regular Wi-Fi fields and comparing the data with something similar to a radar scan. The requisite data was gathered in 0.015 seconds, and correlated with the seventy-five per cent scan results in 0.07. SMART stopped the elevator, and patched in the Citadel's internal security computer.

  If SMART had been given a simulated sense of humor by its creator, alongside its simulated emotion, the appropriate response might have been "
Bingo!
" But the robot remained silent, accepting the logical conclusion derived from the available data.

  Someone was in Subcontrol Three, and was shielding themselves from detection by deflecting all electromagnetic energy waves in a small umbrella which formed a small blank spot on the robot's scan. But logic also told SMART that the "intruder" was really one of the other six members of the Seven Wonders, and that as all had authority to carry out their duties precisely as they saw fit, there was no problem. Deflection shield or not.

  SMART redirected the elevator to level thirty, just four floors up. As soon as the doors slid open, it activated a second set of gyros and couplings, transforming the usual slow, heavy and loud gait of the slow, heavy and square white robot into a lithe, smooth motion. Stealth mode was taxing on system memory and couldn't be used for extended periods before SMART's processor heatsinks got hot enough that they could be detected by infra-red through the reflective armor plate. But for sneaking around the Citadel, it would do admirably.

  Subcontrol Three was hardly more than a small cupboard housing a redundant bank of servers and a small control desk, a simplified version of the room-sized panels available in Control One. But depending on what systems you wanted to use, the subcontrol rooms dotted around the Citadel made for comfortable and quiet workspaces, the required controls and systems mapped from the master deck on the top level.

  The door was open as SMART rounded the corridor. Under stealth, only Hephaestus would have been able to sense SMART's presence. The machine had no mind for Bluebell to read and the white armor deflected any energy signature that Aurora or the Dragon Star might have been able to detect. But unlike the hero working in Subcontrol Three, this included the visible spectrum. The eight-foot-tall robot was a vague shimmer of heat in the corridor.

  The person seated at the panel, hunched over in their task, was totally oblivious to the robot's presence. SMART zoomed its optics in. There was the tall golden powerstaff, and the superhero's face was hidden by a huge flowing hood which continued down into a billowing robe over skintight white and red spandex. From the corridor, SMART was only able to see one leg, bare skin visible through a series of geometric – and very revealing – holes in the costume.

  SMART knew that the Dragon Star's costume was designed to be attractive to male humans. Part of the Seven Wonders' mission was PR, and the citizens of San Ventura, rightly or wrongly, wanted to be protected by the perfect and the attractive. The Dragon Star was certainly that, although some logical argument worming its way through the back of SMART's CPU suggested that if the general populace knew that the Dragon Star's body was the corpse of a teenage cheerleader stolen from the city morgue and reanimated by a sexless alien entity, then the athletic, spandex-clad form in enigmatic flowing robes and hood would be a lot less attractive.

  SMART paused, its CPU completing a full cycle with no processes. SMART… SMART
felt
something. It was impossible, of course, and as soon as the errant cycle was detected SMART launched a full array of diagnostic applications and processes, cleared terabytes worth of caches, and restarted several systems.

  Two seconds later the robot's systems were back up and… the
feeling
remained. It was almost disgust. SMART considered, then accepted the logic. It was an assimilation of data based on its knowledge of the Dragon Star and of human society. All the robot needed to do was correlate one with the other and
simulate
a predicted response. This was within its operational parameters, and was therefore entirely logical.

  SMART was disgusted, and shrank back a little in the corridor as it watched the Dragon Star at work.

  SMART
hid.

  The crystal set into the top of the Dragon Star's powerstaff pulsed rhythmically, generating the electromagnetic shield that covered her and the computer desk. SMART cycled its optical filters through a range of wavelengths, recording the data as the Dragon Star alternately appeared and disappeared from view depending on the spectrum.

  SMART considered again. All members of the Seven Wonders had the express permission of their leader, Aurora, to do what they liked to protect the city, within certain bounds – that each superhero was independent and free to pursue justice when the superteam was not "united", as the catchphrase went; that every action had to be within the law, unless an emergency was declared; that the no-kill rule was unassailable.

  But the Dragon Star was hiding under a deflection shield as she worked in Subcontrol Three, and as no one except the Seven Wonders had access to this part of the Citadel, it meant that the Dragon Star didn't want the others to know she was there.

  The Dragon Star was keeping a secret. SMART considered and felt…

  SMART's processor skipped a cycle again, and the robot moved slightly in the dark corridor.

  Another logical deduction and more of this new process, this
simulated
emotion. SMART considered. It was not thinking for itself, it was thinking on behalf of the humans it was programmed to protect. What would the people of San Ventura think if the reanimated body of a dead girl was carrying out secret work at the Citadel, hiding it from the superteam she had sworn her allegiance to? Did the honorable vows of an alien to protect the city count, anyway? What would the
people
think?

  After three hours, the Dragon Star stood, powerstaff held firmly in one delicate hand. SMART's optics crash-zoomed to follow her every movement and gesture. There. She took a data stick from the computer and pocketed it in her cloak. Powerstaff still pulsing, the Dragon Star shut the subcontrol room systems down and closed the door, heading down the dark corridor towards the regular passenger lift, and out of SMART's visual range. The robot continued to track her movements for a while afterwards, seismic detectors registering her movements in the floors above, Citadel security systems feeding video and audio. Not that there was much to see, or hear. The Dragon Star moved through dead corridors silently, and with her staff still throwing the cone of invisibility around her, each night vision camera went black as she passed. The trail of active and inactive cameras was a more-than-adequate tracker for SMART, linked as it was to every system in the whole building.

  Thirty minutes after leaving the subcontrol room, the camera in the Dragon Star's private quarters came on suddenly. She was lying on her futon, asleep, or at least resting the human body. SMART watched for a few minutes but her form remained still. The Dragon Star was the only one of the Wonders to make the Citadel their permanent home. Well, her and SMART, but then SMART
was
the Citadel, in many ways.

  The robot allowed itself to make noise now, clicking loudly as it refolded the stealth mechanisms away and reverting to its regular, cumbersome gait. At an even walking pace, it thudded into the subcontrol room and, pushing the high-backed swivel chair aside, extended a powerful arm towards one of the custom computer ports that were studded throughout the entire building. As soon as SMART connected, the Subcontrol Three came to life, readouts changing and displays scrolling through data as SMART flipped the system back through its last actions. Reaching a selected time point of four hours past, SMART rolled through the residue of erased data still clinging to the solid-state hard drives and computer memory. There. A pattern, an unknown program run, and data from one of the surveillance satellites routed past the main system in Control One and fed directly into the subservers on level thirty.

  SMART saw the message buried in the high-frequency noise of the raw satellite data quickly, like a person focusing on a magic eye picture puzzle. As the graphs changed on the room's two widescreen displays, SMART threw in various filters and decryption algorithms.

  There. The Dragon Star's secret message, a transmission received from the stars.

  SMART rewound the data and replayed.

CHAPTER TWENTY

It was like a scene from a movie.

  Tony sighed. No, it was worse – it was like a scene from a chick flick.
Gabrielle Gets Hitched
, or
My Fat Cashcow Wedding Franchise VII.

  His arms were sore. Why, he wasn't sure. He was a superhero, invulnerable, having woken up with superstrength, flight, heat vision, the whole damn works. A superhero who, just a couple of days ago, had taken on the Cowl in a downtown bank. Who had flown up, up and away, carrying the supervillain in the wild blue yonder. Who had survived the fall in the sea with nothing more than a sore head and who had walked, rather than raced – well, look where racing had got him – soaking wet back home.

  Gee-whizz, that had been a fun day!

  So why holding his arms out for fifteen minutes was such a strain, he had no real idea. It was probably psychological. It was probably because having Jeannie pull and shove his groin with a mouthful of pins just inches away from his… well, made him uncomfortable. He wanted to fidget, to move, to do anything to change position and relieve the stiffness in his muscles, but he dared not break the statuesque pose his girlfriend had put him in.

  Jeannie wanted to make the costume, and make it she would. It was bizarre, to say the least. Jeannie had clothes-making skills worthy of an old-fashioned seamstress, but was using high-tech fabrics acquired from her day job… whatever that was, exactly. Tony wasn't sure. Jeannie had mentioned it was to do with military research and was mostly classified, and she hadn't exactly been laughing when she said it, so he didn't push the issue. It was a little early in their relationship to be breaking official secrets, but he knew the pins in her mouth were a secret tantalum/protactinium alloy. The industrial sewing machine clamped to the kitchen table − looking more like a heavy-duty drill from a factory − used a needle made of the same substance, superheated with two green lasers.