One ex-assassin with monastic combat training. One teenage superhacker. One self-described extremely minor demon. And Dracula's kid sister. High school will never be the same again.... TUESDAY, APRIL 12, 2411 10:30 AM INTERNATIONAL POLICE HEADQUARTERS NEW AVALON, ZETA CYGNI With a towel around his neck to deal with the post-shower dripping of his hair after a good workout, Geoff Depew strode cheerfully through the International Police building in New Avalon, doing what he called a 'Seven Impossible Things' tour. So far he'd caught Paige Guthrie cursing at Jubilee in Klingon, watched Catherine Willows talk to her daughter by power ring, dropped a joke on Cain Marko in such a deadpan tone that the man had put most of a cup of coffee through his sinuses, and watched Jackie Chan kick through a foot of greelwood to settle a bet. Four down, three to go, and that's when his communicator buzzed. "Depew," he said, pulling it from his jacket's inside pocket while dropping the paper cup that had until recently held juice into a bin. "Geoff!" Benjamin D. Hutchins, Chief of the International Police, called by many if not most "Gryphon", sounded remarkably cheerful. "Do you have a minute?" "I'll be right up, Chief." He headed towards the elevator, pausing to drop a small packet of cookies off with Lindsay Willows, who was still having a conversation with her mother - two floors down - via the Emerald Eye of Ekron. As the doors closed, Geoff wondered whether it was his imagination, or did the Eye look just the tiniest bit bored? When he got to the 39th floor, Lu Durgo waved him into the Chief's office, where the Chief was not alone. Seeing the pretty woman clad in a black catsuit stretched out in one of the armchairs in the officer, Geoff paused. "I hope I'm not interrupting anything you'll need to go to Confession for, sir." "I regret nothing," Gryphon replied reflexively. The woman, whose hair was as dark as the leather catsuit she wore, giggled, as the Chief shook his head. "You, sir, have clearly fallen under bad influences. What happened to your priestly reserve?" "Left it in my other suit, sir," Geoff said in a total deadpan. Then he turned to the woman. "Geoff Depew, SA 7. A pleasure." She grinned at him, adding a wink. "Max Guevara, SA 11." "Ohhhhhhhh," Geoff said, nodding. "So I was - " Gryphon groaned, Max giggled again, and Geoff relented. "I'll behave. What's up, Chief?" "I need something done and I want you to do it. But since you're only SA 7, you're going to need a supervisor, and Logan, to be as blunt as he was, can't be arsed with this particular job. Thus: Max." She turned her arm around, revealing the Lens on the inside wrist of the band she wore. "Okay, then," said Geoff. "What are we looking to do?" Gryphon leaned back, grinning. "Officially, you're going to be taking a ship from B6 orbital storage to a shipyard in the Conroy sector. It's heavily automated, so the small team won't be a problem. Unofficially?" He leaned forward, the grin getting uncannily wider and a small, mischievous gleam in his eyes. "Unofficially, you're going to get to live the dream of all right-thinking persons of good character. "You're going to pull a -heist-." Come out and play... /* Offspring "Come Out And Play" _Smash_ */ Eyrie Productions, Unlimited and Bacon Comics Group present UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES FUTURE IMPERFECT Hellbringer and the After-School Special Mission Force #1 "The Bad Bank Caper" scripted by Geoff Depew pencils & inks by your imagination letters by Geoff Depew & Benjamin D. Hutchins editor: Benjamin D. Hutchins Bacon Comics chief: Derek Bacon (c) 2009 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited "A heist," Geoff said to Max as they stepped into the elevator. "Wow. I've violated a lot of laws, but I've never actually robbed a bank." "And this isn't just any bank, either. Plus the OTHER problems we're probably going to run into." Max leaned against the wall of the elevator as it lowered them down to the tenth floor. "Yeah. I'm going to need to do some research, set things up. Thankfully this... Queen of Kaboom - " "Ranroon." "Thank you. Ranroon has a lot of open spaces. We can set up a mock of the bank, requisition some holojectors, and practice that way. What do you know about the rest of the team?" "Didn't you read the dossier?" "Max," Geoff said with a slight bit of exasperation, "five minutes. I haven't even opened it." "Well, get reading!" She slapped him on the shoulder, and he got reading. His face got more and more distressed as he did, and as they left the elevator and walked to the briefing office, he sighed. "What. The. Buttons." Geoff shook his head. "How am I supposed to make this work?" "The Chief has faith in you," Max said. He paused, tilted his head, and then chuckled. "This is true." The room, as he entered, was quiet; a state you wouldn't expect three teenage girls to allow in a room. One was carefully taking care of a sword; one sat in a chair, eyes closed, and the last one - the least humanoid one - was in a corner, looking very spooked. "Good afternoon, ladies," Geoff said. "I'm Geoff Depew, team commander for this mission. This is Max Guevara, who will handle oversight and review." He opened the folder. "Brief roll call. Saya Otonashi." The girl with the sword glanced at him with brown eyes and said in a somewhat sullen voice, "Present." "Lain Iwakura." The large datascreen on one wall flickered to life, and a virtual duplicate of the girl with her eyes closed appeared on it, wearing a grey jumpsuit, wielding a very large gun, and in the middle of killing some kind of demonic creature. "Here! I'll be out when I finish the deathmatch!" It flickered off again. Geoff and Max looked at each other, and shrugged. Geoff looked at the list again, squinted, tilted the folder, drew no more compelling conclusion from it that way, and said in a have- I-got-this-right tone, "... Penance?" The creature in the corner scuttled forward, its red-black matte skin unreflective in the overhead lights. It - no, she, certainly, what Geoff had taken for black chitin was really some kind of conformal body wrap, and the figure underneath was a little scrawny but definitely feminine - raised a pair of hands that looked more like extended claws than fingers and gestured, Present, in Standard Sign Language. "All present, then, in body if not in mind." As he said that, Lain shook her head and opened her eyes. "And there's in mind. Welcome to the real world." "Thank you," Lain said, her voice much more subdued than it had been in the game. "The reason you're here is to help pull off a very special mission." He slid a disk into the room's projector, and on one wall, the picture of a stolid building appeared: made of granite, small windows, a revolving door, and grotesques on the corners of the second floor ridge. "This is Veidt Savings and Loan, a small but very active bank on Kane's World. It was founded in 2372 in this very building. It has only this branch, and is very selective in its patrons. An illegal records trap in 2401 found that every single depositor in the bank has a file with at least a planetary-scale law enforcement organization." "A black-bag operation," Lain stated. "Yes. Its name on the street in New Gotham is 'the First National Bank of Crime'. The founder of the bank is listed as one John 'Jack' Napier, AKA Stephen Fuhle, aka Conrad Veidt, aka Francis Gwynplaine, AKA The Red Hood, AKA the Joker. He was a psychopath, expert biochemist, mass-murderer, and foe of the Batman, before he died in 2382." "What did he die of?" Saya asked curiously. "Acute gravity poisoning," Max replied. Penance tilted her head, her jagged, dreadlock-like hair rustling like wire. What? she signed. "He went splat," Max explained, and when Penance nodded, Max elaborated, "He was running from a police officer over rooftops, and apparently didn't realize the next building had been demolished until he'd committed himself to the jump. The reports say he was laughing all the way down." "But the bank kept going," Geoff continued. "It's now one of the largest money laundries on Kane's World, and that's saying something. Even the local Triads use it, because it's safe, effective, and doesn't care where or how you got the money. If you're a criminal, you're their kind of customer." "Aw, don't tell me we have to shut it down," Max said. "I've got a whole CONEX full of Nazi gold that I just can't do -anything- with." Excuse, please, but what is a money laundry, Penance signed. "We'll go over it along the way, Penance." Geoff said, and she nodded. "No, we're not tasked with shutting it down. Not directly, anyway. Nor is our goal to rob the vault. That's the distraction. See, the money is relatively meaningless. What we need is the datasystems cracked and the last year's transaction records grabbed. We're not after the bank, we're after its customers." "Which isn't going to be good news for the marketing department," Max concluded. "Oh well. I'll just have to shop the gold someplace else." Geoff ignored the distraction as best he could. "The problem - and why we're going to Kane's World and why we're planning the heist in the first place - is that the datasystem we want - the black one with the illegal data - is not, in fact, on-line. Another team's already been through their networked systems and drew a blank, apart from this: They accept electronic fund transfers, and disburse electronically, but for certain accounts they have a twenty-four hour wait for the transfers to go through." "Which means they've got a meat bridge in there someplace," said Lain; when Saya gave her a what-language-was-that look, she explained, "A person sitting at a console, transferring data from the white system, the open one, to the black one by hand. It's sitting in a locked room someplace and only a trusted console jockey is allowed to look at both at the same time." "That's the likeliest scenario," said Geoff. "Which means we need to take -our- datasystems specialist in there to the console and crack it." "Oh, wonderful," Lain said sardonically, "meatspace combat." "What," Saya said, craning her neck around, "you have a problem taking your wireless head into the field? Isn't that what you have that rig for?" "The wireless antenna is not in my head, it's in my shoulder blades, where I can shift for better reception." Max blinked. "That's an unusual location." "Well, my skull's got no room for it, with the implants, and it's midway between there and my artificial lung." Lain shrugged. "I don't suppose we have any intel on what the black system actually is." Max shook her head. "No idea. You're going to go in blind. We think they have some of the Joker's biochemically-altered henchmen still alive in there as security, based on the delivery manifests. There's a lot of liquid nutrients, and some unusual chemicals - acetlycholine, synthetic dopamine, some other amino acids." "That's some serious neural boosters - old time smart drugs." Lain paused, as her eyes went vacant, then returned to the conversation. "Not enough information on the biochemical processes to give a good answer to what they might be used for." "Well, think about it," Geoff said. "We're gating to B6 in two hours; a shuttle will take us to our transport, the Queen of Ranroon." Lain blinked. "The Queen of Ranroon? Legendary treasure ship of Xim the Despot?" "That's the one," said Max. Laine went blank again. "Must update Galactipedia page." Geoff went on, "The yard we're going to is located at Star City, in the Oli system; we're going to 'have engine trouble' and need to drop out of metaspace near Kane's World. During the downtime while the engine trouble is repaired, we're going to have a seven hour window to get to the planetary surface, pull the heist, and get back up. We have the building blueprints, so we've got a mockup of the interior, as far as we know it, in one of the cargo bays." Saya raised her hand. "What kind of backup do we have? The Bats?" Geoff shook his head. "We're it. The Batman and his crew haven't been informed - we want to give them plausible deniability." Saya and Lain stared at Geoff, and then Saya sighed. "We're doomed." TUESDAY, APRIL 12, 2411 2:30 PM BAJOR LAGRANGE POINT 2 EPSILON ERIDANI The shuttle deposited them, through a docking tube, aboard the Queen of Ranroon, where she'd been in a stable orbit in one of the Bajor lunar complex's LaGrange points since arriving the year before. There really hadn't been anywhere to put her until a spot at the Oli-3 Historical Ship Drydock and Repair Facility had come open. And now that it had, someone had to take the ship there. That was the story, anyway. It would presumably seem a bit odd to anyone who was aware that the International Police had an entire worldring shipyard at Zeta Cygni, but, as Gryphon said, the beautiful thing about plausible deniability was that it didn't really have to be -that- plausible. The five people stepped on board to find themselves faced by a droid. The droid was almost cylindrical, three feet tall, and waved at them with a pair of arms that looked to be more tentacle-like, except for the big red hands at the end of them. Its LED face-screen showed a pair of happy eyes as it bounded forward on oversized feet. "OH! Oh! I am so happy to meet you all!" Lain raised an eyebrow. "A Stark Omnimech Cosmodroid?" "Yes!" he cried out, the screen changing to show weeping eyes. "Someone recognizes what Mike is! It's so wonderful to be recognized! Mike is MIC-OS-12, but please call Mike Mike! The International Police assigned Mike to be your helper while you are on your trip!" He actually started to dance around. "Mike has set up the hologram devices, put in the bunks, and now Mike is going to make dinner! And coffee!" He stopped his dancing, then gave a pair of V-for-victory signs. "We're all going to be great friends, OK!" "(I think something is seriously wrong with this robot,)" Saya murmured under her breath to Lain. "(No, it's supposed to be like that,)" Lain replied. "(This model all do that. It's some kind of crackheaded human-factors thing, some New Japanese consultant outfit thought it'd make them seem more harmless and socially acceptable.)" She shook her head. "(I'd say it lost something in translation, only I'm -from- New Japan and -I- think it was a stupid idea. But there it is.)" Mike might have seemed overly emotional, but he did, in fact, have things under control. The living quarters hadn't been used for untold eras, so the Cosmodroid had used one of the large rooms to set up some survival cabins; the kitchen facilities were unworkable, so he'd gotten and set up a porta-kitchen; the refresher facilities were unspeakable, and he'd managed to wrangle a whole bathroom. "Where," Geoff asked, checking that out, "did you get THIS? A shower, sure, but the oversized bathtub? The three sinks? The marble fittings? It looks like the bathroom from the Palace Infinity presidential suite in here." "Oh," Mike said, rocking back and forth on his feet, the screen showing shifty eyes, "there was a diplomatic suite on Babylon 6 that was being converted for another race, aaaaaand Mike knows things about the storage system and talked it into letting Mike borrow it for this very, very important group of people! Comfort and cleanliness are always very important things!" Max bent down and kissed Mike on his faceplate. "Your kung fu is best." The screen showed a pair of hearts, and he tapped his index fingers together. "Mike is very happy you appreciate his work!" The trip went as planned, along with a number of run-throughs of the heist, as best they could. This was not always, or even often, very well, and during the meal break after the tenth simulation collapsed into a complete rout and got them all killed, Saya's patience reached its limit. "You know, guys, I've tried to maintain a positive outlook toward this whole thing, but I have to say? It sucks," she said. "We know only slightly more than JACK about what we're going into. Sure, we have the original building plans, but we don't know what they might have done to the place since. The whole mission is ridiculous. We've got half-assed intelligence, half-assed planning, and - " "And a full ass complaining about it all," Lain interjected. "I mean, we could just send you in. You can turn into mist, slip in and get all the information." Saya gave a scornful snort. "I can't turn into mist. What's wrong with you?" Lain tilted her head. "I thought vampires could do that. Turn into mist, or a bat, or a wolf." "Oh." Saya's expression changed from general angst to specific annoyance. "Oh, okay, sure, yeah. Count DRACULA could do all that." Lain blinked. "What, and now you're gonna tell me Dracula wasn't really a vampire?" "No, he sure was. No denying that. But Dracula was ALSO some kind of FREAKIN' WIZARD, which is how he could do that stuff. Me? I have a sword. I cut stuff. Oh, I hate that book. So much hate. So. Much." "That's seriously all you can do?" "Well, no, I have superhuman strength, and I'm hard to kill. Oh, and I have centuries of experience tracking and killing my own kind," she added mock-brightly, before scowling again and grumbling, "That's going to be a -big- help robbing a -bank-." "You two give me a headache," Max said, her head on the table. Mike came bounding over, followed by Geoff, who carried a large platter covered in sandwiches, along with a number of bottles and boxes and small bags. "Lunchtime!" he cried out, causing Penance to come bounding over. The odd creature had been a quiet and reliable presence, even if she ignored the bed she was given and slept on the deck plating, and never seemed to use the bathroom for anything. She looked at the pile of sandwiches as Mike set them down on the table. Food?, she signed. "Yes! Mike made food!" Max's head came up from the table. "I swear if anyone eats any turkey sandwiches before I get one I will gut you all." Her eyes were a little glassy, and her hair a little damp with perspiration. She looked as if she'd just pulled an all-nighter in a 19th-century shirt factory. Her younger cohorts found this a bit startling, since in their admittedly limited experience, Max had never seemed to stress over anything. Now one of her hands darted across the table and grabbed a turkey sandwich, and the other seized big bottle of milk on the platter Geoff was setting down. For a brief moment the others were witness to a horror of food consumption not seen since Tuncer bit into a bubblegum pack. "mmm mmm tuuuuuurkeeeeey," Max said, falling back in her chair with a blissful expression. "Is there dust in the sandwiches?" Lain said, eyeing the sandwiches very dubiously. "No, mayo," Geoff replied as he looked at the sandwich in his hand carefully. "Max has an enzyme deficiency that causes her trouble sometimes, and turkey and milk help with it." "Ah," she replied, taking one of them for her own. Penance had speared hers with one long finger, and was eating it in small bites around the edges. At previous meal breaks Saya had eaten normal food like the rest of them. This time, though, she picked up only a drink box from the beverage tray. It was black with red edges and marked with the Galactic Standard biological hazard trefoil, but this didn't seem to bother her at all as she popped up the built-in straw and started sipping. "Please tell me that's not blood," Lain said, staring in horror. Saya gave her a cool look. "Weren't you just being all disappointed about my lack of apparent vampiric attributes?" She shook her head. "Just no pleasing some people." Seeing Lain look slightly queasy as she took another sip, the vampire relented slightly and told her, "It's a synthetic blood analog. Someone in BPRD Tech Services thought it would keep better and be less of a PR liability for field mission issue. It's... " She regarded the box thoughtfully, then grimaced. "... pretty poor, if I'm honest. They should just put it in Thunderbird bottles rather than these fancy boxes." She shrugged. "Still, it's better than noshing on one of you guys, I suppose." Lain found herself allowing that perhaps it was, at that. WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13, 2411 1:42 AM METASPACE /* Suzanne Vega (with Joe Jackson) "Left of Center" _Pretty in Pink_ Soundtrack */ Geoff's altered physiology meant he didn't need as much sleep as most people, so he was in his bunk reading instead of sleeping when there was a sound outside. He poked his head out to find Penance at the table, scribbling. She looked up with alarm as he did; under the harsh overhead lights he could see the texture of her scarlet skin alter slightly as she tensed, then relaxed. "Hello," he said as he approached, carefully and with his hands empty. Her file from the Chief said that she had spent time as a slave, though it didn't say where, and that she'd been abused a great deal. Matched to the fact that she could, at will - and often, as he'd just seen, involuntarily - tense her skin such that every edge on her body was sharp enough to flay human skin with a touch, and Geoff saw plenty of reason to be as peaceful as possible around her. "What are you doing awake?" he asked. Don't sleep unless I want to, she signed. Wanted to draw. "Can I see your drawings, or do you not want to show them yet?" She tilted her head, then signed, You see, no one else yet. Geoff came over. She drew like a small child, with crayons and stick figures. One of them was a sort of self-portrait, her with a sandwich, and the words 'I CAN HAS SAMMICH' written next to it. There were drawings of the others - Saya's obvious from the sword, Lain with waves coming off her head, and Mike was, well, Mike. I'm not very good yet, she signed. "You're also faking being as bad at the language as you are." She didn't seem surprised that he'd seen through her. Yes, she replied simply. People think I'm stupid because I can't talk. Or deaf. Either way, then I can surprise them. "I don't think you're stupid. You just can't talk. Doesn't mean you can't hear." She nodded her head vigorously. That's right, she signed. I'm better communicating this way, but I can hear. And I understand a lot of what I hear, because of what I am. Geoff settled down, sitting on the floor. "Are you willing to tell me what you are? I've never seen any humanoid like you, but there's a lot I haven't seen. If you don't trust me enough yet, that's fine." She blinked, then tilted her head. Then she looked past him. Geoff turned to look as well. Somehow Mike had managed to come up behind them, bringing two cups of tea with him, without either of them noticing him. "Mike thought you might want some tea," he said, more restrained than usual. These were handed over, and Mike settled down next to Geoff. Penance sipped some tea, and then began, explaining that she was a skraeling - the most minor named demons in the reckoning of her native Muspelheim, used for menial labor - and then telling the story of her strange and improbable escape from the world of casual cruelty and the ever-present danger of sudden, violent death that had been the only life she ever knew. Geoff was surprised to realize, though she mentioned no names, that it involved people he knew - though it didn't surprise him to learn that those same people had been the first ever to show her kindness. And now, she signed, they wanted me to find something to do. They told me that I was free, and that I was able to do whatever I wanted. So I asked what they do. And they brought me to here where I met you all. Mike's face-screen had changed to a pair of eyes with animated water flowing from them. "Oh, that's so sad. Mike is so glad you found a good place! Mike knows what that's like! Mike is free too!" A panel slid aside on his plastron, revealing what Geoff recognized as a Turing certification medal. "Mike just loves what he does." This required a brief explanation to Penance about intelligent machines, their ownership, and what it took for them to be free and independent creatures. That's terrible, she signed. "The problem is that most machines aren't fully sentient." Geoff sighed. "Some of them become that way, but not all of them. No one knows exactly how it happens. The process is screwy, yeah, but at least the International Police Organization has a policy in place for the machines it owns to be automatically reviewed by Turing if they seem to have crossed the line. That's a pretty good attitude, and not one you see everywhere." "But Mike... Mike is free. Mike has a good life." Penance looked around at the rusted hold, where Mike had made the living area. Then, with a sardonic expression on her face, signed, This is good for you? "Mike was a service robot! This is what Mike does. Admittedly, Mike doesn't usually work on starships that are 8,000 years old. Mike has standards. But a job's a job. Why should Mike not do what he likes and is good at?" "He has a point, Penance.... Uh. Do you have a name you prefer to Penance? It has a kind of oddness to it." She tilted her head, quizzically. Well, she signed, what else could I be? Most skraeling don't even have proper names; we're just You There or Number 16 or The One Who Is About To Die. I only have one because of the woman who sent me to Midgard... and even then, I think she meant it as a sort of dark joke. I'm only just starting to figure it out. "Well, we can shorten it. Penny? How does that sound?" She tilted her head quizzically. "Mike like Penny!" Mike said. Well, then I think it will work. /* The Eagles "Journey of the Sorcerer" _One Of These Nights_ */ "Okay," Geoff said, as they gathered around the small holotable in the runabout, "here's the plan. Max and I will go in here - the front door. Make it look like a robbery. You three will go in here." He pointed at a roof vent on the hologram. "Max will case it beforehand and disable any alarms. You'll head down the aircon vents, to here. That should put you out near the core. Lain, you'll hack it, and Penny and Saya will cover. Once you're done, exfiltrate as fast as you can, let us know, and Max and I will finish the 'robbery' and run." "Oh good, the aircon vents," said Lain, without looking up from organizing a set of isochips into a neuroprocessor dock module. "I was -hoping- we'd be hitting all the cliches on this job." "Where did the Chief find you, anyway?" Saya asked. "Did Jubilee drag him to an all-night rave in Little Shinjuku?" "(Elstree, actually,)" Lain mumbled under her breath; then, more audibly and a trifle mournfully, "I wish we had more information on the data systems." "Bring your best icebreakers. It's not like you need to be subtle with this one." Lain nodded, eyes going far-away as she ran through her storage. Saya made a noise and peered more deeply into it. "How are we getting there from the spaceport?" "Rental van." Saya nodded at Max's reply. "Mike will be on the runabout?" The quirky Astrodroid had hopped on top of a chair in order to see the table. "Yes. Don't open the doors for anyone except us." Geoff looked around the table. "Any other questions?" "We're going with nonlethals?" Max regarded the front door carefully. "Yeah. The Bat has friends in New Avalon, and we don't need that kind of trouble. I've loaded my guns with actors, and you'll have a stunner." "Actors?" Max tilted her head. Geoff drew the Canon, popped open the revolver's cylinder, and pulled out a bullet. It looked like a normal hollowpoint until Geoff thumbed off the rubber tip, revealing two small packets of liquid, one green and one red. Max's face screwed up into a look of distaste. "Oh, -those,-" she said. "I got shot with one of those. Twice." She twisted her neck slightly as if it pained her. "I don't envy our pigeons their headaches." "The green is a derivative of Mark 47 anti-intruder gas," Geoff explained to Saya's quizzical look. "The red makes it look like there was actual blood. We usually use them for mock assassinations. Make it look like an agent's been whacked and the bad guys will stop looking out for him." "Sweet." Saya watched as he reassembled it and put it back into the gun. "One of these days I should learn to shoot." She shrugged. "Though from what I saw when I met the Chief, it doesn't do a ton of good against the kind of things I usually fight." "We're good?" As the four ladies nodded, Geoff grinned. "Let's go rob ourselves a bank." NEW GOTHAM CITY KANE'S WORLD, CONROY SECTOR 1:13 PM GOTHAM STANDARD TIME /* "Relax" Powerman 5000 _Zoolander_ soundtrack */ The doors burst open, and the big man yelled, "FREEZE! This is a stick-up!" The lithe woman in the black lycra leaned around to hit the guards with a stunner. The big man pulled a bag from his coat and threw it at the teller desk. "Fill it!" "We can't," one of them - a man in his 20s - said smugly. "The moment you broke in here, we locked them, and only the manager can unlock it." The big man nodded, then shot the smug teller in the chest with his tremendous handgun. The teller took two steps backwards, a look of remarkable shock on his face, and collapsed over a desk. "The manager should do that before I shoot someone else." A small, twitchy man with a face that resembled that of a weasel scuttled out. "I'm Giles DeVroon, the manager, and I will not comply - " He was cut off as the man with the handgun shot another teller in the chest, sending her down. "You're running out of tellers, Mr. DeVroon. After them I start shooting custo - " He stopped to shoot a customer in the upper left of his chest; as the man dropped, the pistol he'd been trying to draw clacked to the floor before he fell on top of it. " - mers other than that one." DeVroon's eyes widened as he began to rethink his policy. THREE MINUTES EARLIER The security on the roof had been disabled, and the three young women slid easily into the vent. Penance went first, carving out handholds as she did; then Lain, and finally Saya taking the rear. By the time Geoff had finished shooting the Mafioso in the lobby, they were outside the door. "Hmm, a Stage Three electrolock," Lain mused. "This'll take me six minutes to crack with the algorithms I've got loaded. I wonder if it might be quicker to - " Penance silently slipped past her, raised one talon-like index finger in an approximation of the "one moment please" gesture, then drove it into the center of the doorknob, gave it a quarter-turn, and pulled it out again. The door swung soundlessly open. "... Although not as much quicker as that," Lain finished. "Nice." When they stepped inside, Saya and Lain nearly gagged at the smell in the room. It was hideously, terribly organic, like rotting meat. And then they saw it: It was, perhaps, at one time, human - some kind of humanoid, anyway. But it was locked into a chair of some kind, with tubes locked into the life support throne. The throne widened to support the gigantically misproportioned head, perhaps five feet across and the same tall, hundreds of wires linking the cranium to the tiara that topped the support structure, and one fat cable connecting that to a large I/O console adjacent. Whatever it was, it had not been looked after particularly well - one of the hands was nearly skeletonized from some kind of rot, and that's just what they could see. "-What- the -crap,-" Saya breathed. The surviving tellers were stuffing cash into bags - Geoff noted Novaya Rodina rubles, New Japanese yen, and even some Nar Shadda creditsticks - when his headpiece beeped. He activated the subvocal microphone and took the call. "Uh. Cipher to Lead." "Lead here," Geoff's voice came into her ear. "Report." "This is not a normal computer, Lead. It's biological. I don't know if I can hack him." "Define 'biological', One?" The creature opened its over-large eyes, which were covered with a thick, rheumy coating. "Intruders detected in server room," it said in a deep but sloppy voice. "Mode change. Mental Organism Designed Only for Computing mode deactivate." "Oh, crap," Lain said. At the same time, Saya said the same thing - along with Geoff in her ear, causing an interesting momentary mental dissonance. What was -he- saying "oh crap" about? He couldn't see this... thing. "Mode initiate: Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing. MODOK programming activated." Lain had a brief moment where the back of her head screamed IT IS LOOKING AT ME to the front of her head in absolute terror. A burst of energy - pure coherent psychic energy, so powerful it was visible - lanced at Lain, and just before she expected her brain to explode, a blade interposed, deflecting it into the ceiling. "GET TO FREAKING WORK!" Saya yelled, and raised her blade again. Lain, no fool, pulled a cord from her interface buffer and jacked into the console. For himself, Geoff's "oh crap" came in response to a sudden command from the doors. "FREEZE!" Geoff had no desire to screw with the cops - that was more trouble than it was worth - but now they were HERE and that made things difficult. The two cops that entered the door... ....were not NGCPD cops. Geoff shrugged and shot them. "Rent-a-cops." DeVroon's eyes bugged out. "You just messed with the Enforcers, bastich!" The Enforcers, Geoff remembered from the briefing, was a for-hire rent-a-cop group, but with little to no regard for things like "minimal force". No, those were the scouts, and probably they were setting up for... ....not a full assault, he then realized. Too many possible hostages. They'd be getting paid well to keep these fatcats alive. There was a muffled crump from outside. "What the hell was that?" Max asked. "We're not getting the deposit back on that rental," he replied. Max paused, stared at him, then shrugged. Saya was starting to tire. Blocking these psychic beams was tiring, yes, not just because of the physical effects, but even for a creature like her, the psychic feedback it caused hurt a lot - and under pressure, that fake blood -really- wasn't feeding the bulldog. She made a mental note to bring it up to Count Orlock if she got out of here with her unlife. "You Are In My Mind," the bizarre computer/creature - MODOK, apparently - chanted in a metallic voice. "Stop. Stop. I Can Feel You Cutting Into My Mind." It began to rotate again, to blast Lain, but then it got very, very distracted. Penance, whom it had ignored, worked out the correct angle and came across the room like a missile, slashing through the support throne's chemical tubes, releasing even more terrible organic slurry smells into the air. It began to make a horrible hacking cough, limbs starting to twitch. Just before the eyes closed, Lain yelled, "I got - " Then she screamed as the MODOK died with her consciousness still extended cybernetically into its mind. "V TO LEAD, WE ARE DONE!" Saya yelled into her headpiece. "EXFILTRATING NOW!" Her sword slashed through the cable connecting Lain to the console, and she hefted the hacker over a shoulder. Penance was already ahead of her, heading out the door. By the time Saya got there, three guards were staring at the stumps of hands - hands that lay on the floor, twitching around gun hilts - and Penance was leading the charge down the corridor in a lupine all-fours lope. "Well," Geoff Depew said, "it's been a lovely time, but we're going to be going now." Max grabbed the bag. DeVroon smirked. "Through the Enforcers?" "No, your back door." "We don't have a - " Geoff shot him. "Boring conversation anyway." "I thought you said you weren't going to shoot him," Max said, as they ran through an 'employees only' door towards the back of the bank. "You weren't tempted?" "No. Guns are noisy and messy. I wanted to break his neck." "That would have meant getting his hair tonic on your hands." "You have a point." Geoff and Max got to the meeting place first. As they passed it, Geoff slapped a charge on the wall and they kept going around the corner, where they nearly ran into the other three. "Lain said she got what we came for before the thing died," Saya reported. "Hope she still has it." "Two, one..." Geoff replied, and then the charge blew. "How the hell are we going to get out of here?" Max cried, as they piled out over the rubble, Lain slung over her shoulder. Speaking quietly to no one in particular, Saya counted, "And... three. Two. One." /* They Might Be Giants "Jessica" _Why Does The Sun Shine?_ */ And just as she reached "one", a black Maybach limousine - for one heart-stopping second Geoff mistook it for the Batmobile, with its sleek lines and impossibly long-looking nose, until he noticed its grimly Teutonic grille - screeched to a halt in front of them. Both passenger-side doors hissed softly open, revealing a cavernous expanse of black leather and polished piano wood. A scent not unlike that of a very expensive coat rolled out to meet them. Saya grabbed Lain and shoved her into the back seat, then climbed in after her with Penance and Max following. Geoff tumbled into the passenger seat. The doors both closed with the same unhurried German precision behind them. "Hey, Stig," Saya said to the driver. The driver - clad like his car all in black, faceless in his full-enclosure helmet - nodded once and peeled out down the alley, onto the street, and down towards the spaceport. Geoff turned to look over his shoulder. "How's Lain?" Max was checking the girl out. "One hell of a case of dumpshock, plus she was, uh, apparently still in that thing when it went down and CAUSED the dumpshock. Most hackers try not to be in a system when it crashes, and I've never treated this before." She applied a hypospray to Lain's slender throat. "This should help... " Lain sat up suddenly, laughing crazily, then flopped back down onto the back bench seat. "... though there may be side effects," Max finished, somewhat lamely. "You've got a heck of a talent for understatement," Saya said. Geoff seemed to notice who their driver was for the first time; he double-took, then craned around with his arm on the back of the seat and asked Saya, "How did you know the Stig would be here? For that matter, why IS the Stig here? THIS Stig." He gestured. "The EVIL Stig." The Stig ignored him. Saya arched an eyebrow, then - somewhat to Geoff's surprise - made the Bela Lugosi cape-mime gesture with one bent arm in front of her face and replied in a thick mock-Romanian accent, "I am... -vampyr.- Ve haff a -special rapport-... vit all ze cheeldren of ze night." All the other team members who were conscious glanced at the black Stig, then as one put the situation aside to deal with the immediate problem. Geoff frowned, not looking at Saya now but past her, through the rear window. "Yeah, should have expected that," he muttered. He turned the other direction, rolled down the window, drew the Canon, and fired three shots out the window behind them. Just barely audible over the sounds of the vehicle they were in were three pops. Through the rear window, Max saw three cars lose their hoods and spout clouds of steam and smoke almost simultaneously. It took a couple of minutes for them to reach the revetment at the spaceport. By the time they arrived Lain was mobile, though as they climbed out she had to be guided by Max and was regarding her hands, quietly giggling over and over, "Fingers. I have fingers." Saya glanced at their driver. "Thanks, Stig. You need a ride out?" The black Stig shook his head and held up a Sainsbury's sale flyer. Saya nodded. "Okay. See you, then." The Stig gave a thumbs-up, then drove off. Max had already gotten the runabout's door open, and the team scrambled inside. Mike had warmed the engines up, and he was jumping with excitement by the time they all were aboard. "Mike called for departure clearance but they said no! What do we do?" Geoff strapped himself into the pilot's chair. "We leave anyway." "That's illegal!" "We're technically criminals already, Mike. So we break another law." And with that, Geoff slapped the control to illuminate the 'fasten seat belts' sign - just to be perverse and started to spool up the engines. "Geoff. GEOFF. They haven't released the revetment hold- downs!" Max had strapped herself into the flight engineer seat. "I know." Geoff started punching an override code into the ship's flight dynamics computer. "Mike, head back to the engine compartment and hang on." "Got it!" The flighty astrodroid ran backwards into the small closet that passed as an engine room on the shuttle. "Three. Two. One. Blastoff." /* Agent Orange "Misirlou" _Living in Darkness_ */ The runabout's impulse engines, at 100%, were set loose as he hit the emergency override on the hold-downs (which were intended to keep the spacecraft in place even if a significant seismic or meteorological disturbance hit the spaceport, as well as to prevent theft), and as they let go with a BANG the entire shuttle leapt up into the sky, inertial dampeners groaning as Geoff's maneuver pushed the edges of its tolerances. Max shut off the comm panel, since they weren't paying attention to ATC anyway. Rather than bother with fripperies like maneuvering, Geoff aimed the runabout straight skywards, looking to make minimum time out of the atmosphere. Gravity and acceleration together pushed them back into the seats as he redlined pretty much everything, making the inertial dampeners whine louder in protest. From behind, they could hear Lain singing, "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do... " "Uh, Geoff? We got company." Max's voice shoved through his concentration. "What? Aw, crap. Can you see what we can do to deal with them?" "Sure. DODGE." Geoff did, making the dampeners' whine escalate to an outright howl. He checked the control... shields, aft shields, where the hell are the aft - The runabout shuddered abruptly. As it did, the lights in the cockpit dimmed and the master alarm keened, along with indicator lights showing failures throughout the runabout's energy systems and a marked drop on the master gauge showing drive power available. "Hull breach in Frame 13! Main Bus A undervolt! EPS tap alarm!" Max cried over the siren. "Impulse reactor is holding!" "Dammit!" Geoff cursed. "That last hit must have cracked something! We're losing power." The communications system snapped on. "Mike here! There's a cross-phase blow-out in the portside power conduits! Mike thinks we need to shut it down and fix it." "We're being chased, Mike," Max said tensely into the comm grid. "and they're shooting at us. We've got no time to fix it." Another blast rattled the shields. "Then Mike will do what needs to be done!" There was a high-pitched electronic squeal; then the intercom went dead, the undervolt lights winked out, and the drive power monitor started to spool up again. "We're being chased by atmospheric craft only," Max said, "and there's nothing on the orbital tac-net about intercepting us. We can get above the Karman line, we're home and dry." With the power restored, that was the work of seconds, and as the sky turned black and star-strewn, they started to relax. Then the intercom came back to life, to the sound of rapid, frantic tapping. Geoff looked at Max, who looked just as confused, and then they both got wide-eyed and said, at the same time, "MIKE!" There was a moment of "we can't both fit through this door" - which Max won by dint of her smaller size and pointier elbows - and then they both were running towards the small wardroom that doubled as the main access point to the abovedeck engineering space. As they entered, they were struck by the sad tableau: Mike, prone and smoking on the wardroom table, arms gone, as Penance kept poking him, gently as she could. Max moved around her, carefully, and got the skraeling's attention. Mike won't talk, she signed. Max nodded. "See up there where his arms are?" Indeed, the severed appendages were sticking out of a pair of maintenance panels, burned and twisted wiring protruding from the sheared-off shoulder hardpoints. "He used himself to reconnect the circuit and save us all." Then she undogged two latches to release a panel on Mike's body, which popped open, and smiled with relief at what she saw in side. "See this in here, where it's glowing? That's his positronic core. He's still alive in here, he just burned out his body to save us. When we get back to B6, he'll be fixed, good as new." Good as new? "Good as new." It was, Geoff though, Penance's smile that made everything they'd gone through worth it. That, and the look on her face - and Saya's - a moment later, when Lain suddenly emitted a loud, power-chord like sound, sat up like a girl emerging from a dream, and said, "Woo! Brainfsck complete, no bad sectors. What'd I miss?" SUNDAY, APRIL 17, 2411 2:30 PM INTERNATIONAL POLICE HEADQUARTERS NEW AVALON, ZETA CYGNI "If I'd known, Geoff, I would NOT have sent you into that." Gryphon leaned back in his chair, shaking his head. Geoff had just delivered his verbal report, the written having been sent from the hostel at Oli 3. "That was above the level I thought you'd have to deal with. And then they had fighters?" "Only jets. If we'd had weapons on the shuttle we wouldn't have had problems. Once we got out of the soup, they couldn't follow." Gryphon nodded. "Still, that's a bit more than I expected you to have to deal with at all. The fact your team got the data is a hell of a miracle." Geoff shook his head. "Lain managed to do the data-dive before MODOK died. If we hadn't been prepared for the weird..." "...which you usually are. And that's an interesting bonus piece of intel, too. We had no idea Napier's syndicate had ever had anything to do with Advanced Idea Mechanics. It's not their usual sort of scam. That bears looking into. Anyway, good work. C'mon, I've got something to show you." He rose, and headed towards the door. "Where are we going?" They reached the elevator, which opened when the Chief hit the button. They stepped in, and the button for the labs in sub-basement 4 was hit. "Down. We go down." The elevator sped to the level, not stopping - Chief's Privilege, Geoff thought - and they arrived in the labs. Leading him past bunches of equipment, Gryphon stopped at a door marked "RL CT/3 ASSEMBLY". A knock opened the door. Skuld Ravenhair, Chief Technologist of the International Police, was finishing work on Mike, it looked like, as Penance watched anxiously from a corner. "Ah! Good, you're just in time." She turned to the skraeling. "Penny, would you press that big red button over there, please?" Penny's large, faintly glowing blue eyes blinked, and she laid her hand on the button, then carefully pressed it. A jolt of green energy passed from an electrode in the ceiling into Mike, and his LED screen scrolled up with diagnostics, then went black before resolving into his eyes. "Mike... feels different. But wait! Did we win?" Geoff felt himself smiling broadly. "Yes, we did, Mike. You made it possible. Dr. Ravenhair had to do a lot of repair work on you, though." She bowed. "Most of your circuitry was burned out, and half your motivators were blown. I just built you a whole new shell and moved your core crystal into it. It was easier that way." "Oooh. Mike can sense the changes." He walked around, waving his arms. "Mike feels more powerful! Yes! Mike feels GOOD!" He bounced on his big red feet a couple times. "...Ohh, new structure commands. Is this true?" Skuld grinned widely. "Go ahead, run it." Mike raised one arm above his head and yelled out, "SYSTEM CHANGE!" /* GGG Orchestra "Mike Sounders the 13 - System Change" _King of Braves GaoGaiGar_ Soundtrack 2 */ In a burst of green smoke, he lifted up off the floor. His arms slid forwards and around, covering his LCD plate. And then his body seemed to unfold, turning him from a three-foot-tall, mostly red cylindrical droid into a six-foot-tall humanoid one, mostly pale blue and grey, with a green bar-optic above a flex-metal half-face, flanged shoulders, and and a clear half-circle on his chest. Striking a pose that seemed to be half badass martial artist stance and half rock-and-roll-hero stage vamp, he bellowed in a less squeaky version of his normal voice, "MIKE - SOUNDERS - MARK THIRTEEN!" Then he recoiled as if in surprise from his very self, looking down at his hands, and said, "Check me OUT! Rock and roll!" Penance's face had a very strong 'ooooh' expression on it. "Now,", Skuld said, turning to Geoff, "for you." Geoff reached into his coat and drew Stormwind, offering the weapon to her. "Thanks, but no. That's yours. No, for you, it's this." There was a moment where Geoff felt dizzy, in the center of a bright light... And then his right wrist was heavier. He looked at it, and blinked. A metal band wrapped around the wrist, and in it was a shimmering, dark green gem. He blinked again, and then again, then looked at Skuld, and then at Gryphon. Then his eyes rolled up in his head and he fell over backwards. "Well!" Gryphon said with a bit of a smirk, "We recruit them for moral fiber, not their physical resilience. Mike, want to give me a hand here?" Mike gave a thumbs-up and grabbed Geoff's legs. Two hours later or so, Geoff was walking away from the impromptu celebration of his Lensing when someone stopped him. She was a foot and a half shorter than he was, he outweighed her by a factor of (at the very least) two to one, and he was absolutely convinced that she could kill him if she wanted to and he wouldn't have any way to stop her. "I have a message for you." Cassandra Cain said simply. "Okay." He waited. "Don't. Do. That. Again." Geoff rather doubted the message was verbatim - he'd met the current Batman and knew he had a harder time than his predecessors pulling off the Grimster McStuffypants riff with allies - but he had to admit, the kid had the presence for it. He nodded judiciously. "Would you be willing to send a message back for me?" She nodded, just once. "Good. I was under orders to not tell any member of his crew, so he could deny knowledge if anyone asked. If I hadn't had those orders, I'd have coordinated with his people in a heartbeat." He smiled very slightly. "The vault infil would've been a lot easier with Catwoman along." She nodded again, then smiled, very slightly. "He'll tell Gryphon, then." Then she took a half-step backward, into a shadow slanting out from an alley, and vanished. "She's kind of scary," Max said from behind Geoff. "Yeah." "C'mon," she said, snagging his arm. "Lain and Penance want to go for lunch, and Saya's willing to go along with us. We'll celebrate your Lens and the registration of the After-School Special Mission Force." "That sounds - What?!" Geoff stared at Max. "The what what what force?" "Gryph decided you did well enough with the people you're with that he's putting it on the TO&E. Our official designation is 'Special Assignment 139 (Infiltration/Countercriminal)', but Saya made one of those snarky comments she makes and now that's the codename." At Toscanini's, three hours after that, they were sitting around after a frozen celebration (which Penance had found herself enjoying more than she thought she would, demolishing a terrifying amount of Cake Batter ice cream in the process), in a mildly somnolent state, when someone walked up to the table. "...you're slacking off, Lensman," Gryphon said to Geoff with a tone of surprise. "Yes, sir," Geoff replied. "It's been a tough week. I am therefore slacking off." "Well," Gryphon said after a moment, "I suppose you did earn it. Tomorrow you start your new assignment, though." They all sort of straightened up. "What is it?" Geoff said. "Someone stole the Star of Shiva from the Royal Museum on Salusia a week ago. They took it to the Outer Rim, to a planet called Moria, and sold it to a rich collector out there. You're going to have to steal it back." Geoff looked around the table. Saya raised an eyebrow; Lain smiled; Penance wiggled her fingers, Max tapped the table, and Mike, back in astromech configuration, gave a pair of V-for-victory signs. "Yeah," Geoff said. "We're up for that." /* Joe Satriani "Ride" _Flying in a Blue Dream_ */ Eyrie Productions, Unlimited and Bacon Comics Group presented UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES FUTURE IMPERFECT Hellbringer and the After-School Special Mission Force Vol. 1 No. 1: The Bad Bank Caper The Cast (in order of appearance) Geoff Depew Benjamin "Gryphon" Hutchins Max Guevara Saya Otonashi Lain Iwakura Penance MIC-12 Giles DeVroon MODO{C|K} The Black Stig Skuld Ravenhair Cassandra Cain by Geoff Depew with Benjamin D. Hutchins with the aid of The EPU Usual Suspects E P U (colour) 2009 Next time in Hellbringer and the After-School Special Mission Force: "We're blown. We're SO blown." "Max, Max, calm down. What's wrong?" "I just saw Parker." "Parker? THE Parker? I thought she retired after she killed a bunch of people who stiffed her on a job." "Eliot." "Geoff." "How's the nose?" "Fine. How's the thumb?" "Fine." As Geoff opened the door, he saw Parker, and Eliot, and a black man, and a very pretty humanized Salusian, and sitting in the chair was a man he recognized. Before Geoff went for the guns, the man in the chair raised one hand - open and unarmed. "I think we may have a community of interest here, Mr. Depew. Can we discuss this rationally? I'm Nathan Ford, and we are Leverage Consulting and Associates." THE THREE CARD MONTE CAPER