Part Five

Back in San Francisco, the trio made their report. Steel Lace was both fascinated and irritated.

"I need to contact the Park Service about this, soonest," she said, after the exploration team finished. "This will probably be a multi-agency project. At the very least, the FBI needs to send a forensics team there to figure out just what the Hell happened."

"The Park Service probably won't like that," said Tiger, with a smirk.

"They asked us for our help and advice," said Steel Lace. "I'll advise them this is what they need to do. Very firmly. While also telling them I've already sent copies of the report to the FBI and the Bureau of Special Resources. As well as that they - the Park Service - need to keep people away from that island until the FBI - or whoever - can investigate it."

"I bet we still wind up helping with this, though," said Mesa, actually seeming a bit eager. "Which is fine with me. I want to solve this mystery!"

* * *

"Well, I'm going to be on detached service for a while," said Vic, when Michelle got home from her job a few days later. "I've been assigned to help the FBI with yet another old, underground mad scientist base!"

"This isn't that transfer you were talking about."

"No. Just a temporary reassignment." Vic said, reassuringly. "Frankly, I don't know why they're sending me. They already have a bunch of FBI agents on scene investigating. If they need super help, Tricorne are the ones with most of the recent experience exploring old supervillain bases. When I called them to check, though, they hadn't heard anything about it! Anyway, my boss told me to pack for a week in an isolated area. They'll cycle in someone else by then."

"I better help you pack," said Michelle, pragmatically. "You're bound to forget something. For example, your period is due to start in about a week and a half."

"Don't remind me," said Vic, rolling her eyes.

"See?" said Michelle, smirking briefly. "You don't even like to think about that. Well, who does... Anyway, it can come early, you know, or you could be there longer than they expect. So, better to be prepared."

"I wish you could come with me," said Vic, quietly, almost shyly.

"Maybe next time," said Michelle, also quietly.

* * *

Vic's arrival at the island two days later was very different from that experienced by either of the two teams of Bay Area Guardians. Which expeditions she had only learned about at her final briefing for this mission.

"We tore out the old, rotting dock," said the Park Service ranger who was piloting the boat taking Vic and a load of supplies to the island. "Put in a floating dock and then cleared the brush on the path from the shore to the house. All stuff we in the Park Service are good at. We even have experience with murder investigations. Mad science stuff, not so much."

He deftly brought the boat up to the new fixture, cut the motor them tied them to the modern dock, fore and aft. Vic noted that the floating dock showed signs of use and figured it was something they kept on hand for just such emergencies. The ranger gestured at a pile of boxes in the boat, covered with a tarp.

"Can you help me with these supplies?"

"Sure," said Vic, moving to start hefting boxes onto the dock. "Have there been any more appearances by the mysterious influencer?"

"Nobody here but us chickens," said a new voice. "Oh, and the occasional moose."

Vic and the ranger looked up, startled, to see a man in regular - though rugged - clothing, standing on the doc.

"Tiger!" said Vic. She had never met the man, but knew a great deal about him. She certainly recognized her fellow super martial artist from images.

"I can help with those. I'm going to be using a lot of it, so that's only fair."

"Oh, hey," said the ranger, who had apparently met Tiger before, grinning. "The more the merrier."

Vic had hoped her first meeting with the other martial arts super would be more social, but both were immediately put to work moving the boxes to the camp.

Between the three of them - Tiger carrying the biggest part of the load by a considerable measure, with Vic a distant second and the ranger a meager third - they soon had the supplies delivered. At least with Tiger's help they only needed one trip. Their destination was the small camp which had been built in a cleared area near the front door of the house. There were four full tents, and a large canopy over what seemed to be a common area, which included the kitchen and eating tables. With Vic and the supplies delivered, the ranger said his goodbye and left.

"Did you get all your luggage off the boat?" said Tiger, once Vic had put her load of supplies away. He grinned at Vic's affirmation. "Good thing; I already told the ranger to leave. Anyway, I'm glad to see that you brought a backpack. Is that case your armor?"

"Yeah," said Vic. "Don't know how much use it'll be here, but I have it if I need it."

"At least both your pieces are reasonable," said Tiger, smirking. "We've actually had people arrive with wheeled luggage, who then complained that the wheels weren't much use on the rough ground. As if that were the fault of the people already here. Okay, you're in this tent, here. You're sharing with two other women. There's a camp toilet and a camp shower out beyond the canopy, both clearly labeled and widely separated. The house is not fit for living in - too much mold - and we are also considering the whole thing a potential crime scene. If you want to leave your unpacking until later I can show you the work site now."

"Let's go!" said Vic dumping her large pack and case beside her assigned cot and symbolically dusting her hands together.

* * *

"Brrrr..." said Vic, as they entered the frigid basement laboratory. She looked at Tiger. "Aren't you cold?"

The place was lit with portable glow panels on stands; lights which produced almost no heat. In fact, that those working here were making an effort to keep the overall temperature below freezing was obvious. Though the room was cold, most of the ice and frost had been carefully removed from equipment and paths across the concrete floor. The bodies were gone, as well. The human bodies.

"No," said Tiger absently. "Except for the basement, the house was emptied of all belongings, right down to the furniture. That one clock, upstairs, was left, which is why I thought it might conceal something. Okay this is agent Folgert; he's in charge. Philo, this is Vic Peltior, from the Bureau of Special Resources, out of Detroit."

"I'm very pleased to meet you," said agent Folgert, offering his hand. "Especially since you're an experienced federal LEO. Most of my team are lab-only people."

"I did have some crime scene investigation classes in college, and learned a lot more related to that on the job. However, I'm not actually qualified to do anything down here except provide another pair of hands. Though the main reason they gave me for being here is to protect you folks if that guy who chased off the first team of Bay Area Guardians returns, or he has friends."

"I'm sort'a doing both jobs so far, being a resister and rather strong," said Tiger, minimally. "Unfortunately, I'm needed back at the Bay Area Guardians base, soon."

"Let me show you around and introduce you," said Folgert, gesturing towards the nearest group of investigators.

Their first stop was straight ahead from the bottom of the stairs: The lone tube in the middle of the room.

"She's so lifelike," said Vic, as she stared at the costumed woman floating in the tube. "Excuse me for being morbid, but she looks like a fresh drowning victim, still underwater."

Vic shivered a bit at the events which were responsible for this memory. Folgert nodded in sympathy, then gestured at the tube.

"We still don't know if there was a human - well, superhuman - Radio Star and Mordecai was planning to replace her with this, or this was the one and only. If the latter, well, why?"

"Did you recover those tapes?" said Vic, noting that the recording gear built into the nearby elaborate - and typical mastermind/mad inventor tech - control panel had no reels.

"Yes. We're still working on reading them. They had a proprietary format which Mordecai must have developed for his own use. All we know so far is that each tape has multiple channels, with one of those apparently reserved for voice. Only the voice isn't plain analog, but encoded or scrambled, somehow. Fortunately, we also found several lab notebooks in plain - if technical - English, which have been a big help."

Folgert sighed, and looked tired.

"Yeah," said Vic, nodding in her turn. "Masterminds, gadgeteers and mad inventors all tend to be paranoid. They're always afraid someone will steal their ideas. That's why so few of them sell their stuff commercially. Well, that and the problem that most people can barely use their complicated controls, even with the inventor instructing them. I bet those notebooks have a bunch of unconventional usage of words and terms, if only because no-one else had done what he was doing then, so he made up his own."

"You win the bet," said Tiger, grinning.

"We still aren't even sure what killed the actual people we found here," said Folgert. "They all had signs of major cerebral hemorrhage, but what caused that?! A group of half a dozen people don't all just bleed into the brain at once by coincidence! A typical cerebral hemorrhage wouldn't kill everyone who got it so quickly they wouldn't show signs of reaction, either! However, you'll find no signs in the bodies or the scene that they had any time to react."

"There is a history of people here being overcome by a cryoprotective gas, but even they showed some reaction," said Tiger, shrugging. "One of them actually managed to get out of the small room where the exposure occurred before being overcome."

The tour next covered some of the equipment in the room - though only briefly, since the techs were still figuring out what much of it did - then went to the far end of the row of tubes along the left wall. Much of the floor was still coated in ice, but several paths had been cleared. All of the storage units - which is what the tubes had turned out to be - had had enough frost removed for the contents to be seen. Unlike "Radio Star" these androids were all naked.

"You can see the progression," said agent Barrow, pointing to the large figure in the furthest tube, back in a poorly lit corner. "That earliest construct was patterned on a very large and muscular man. It is basically a light alloy frame with control systems and actuators and a rubber covering. Not very convincing, though it might pass for human at a distance. It was more like a realistic, motorized mannikin than something intended to imitate a human in detail; like one of the early animatronic units at those theme parks."

"I'm starting to understand why I'm the one the Bureau sent here," said Vic, wryly. "I suspect my experience with animatronics and robots was likely a significant factor. Even though that was actually pretty limited."

"As you go along the line the constructs become more and more lifelike," said Barrow, indicating the tubes with a sweeping gesture. "Including getting smaller, though the last in this row was still a bit above average human size."

"Even Radio Star was tall and broad-shouldered for a woman," said Folgert.

"There's something else," said agent Tombe, whose immediate ancestors were from Haiti, pointedly. "Yes, as they got smaller they became equally male and female. However, they are all White."

"Well, that first Mordecai was known to be racist," said Tiger, sourly. "He probably saw White as the only skin color worthy of being simulated. Even though under the skin everyone is typically the same. I understand he even rejected blood transfusions, because he heard they mixed blood from different 'races.'"

Vic noted that Folgert and Barrow looked a bit embarrassed. Fortunately, one of the techs working on a shorter tube - actually more of a tub - at the end of the row near the stairs called out just then.

"Hey, over here! This is... weird."

"Weird even for this place?" said Folgert, as he and the others hurried to join the tech.

The tech had managed to get the lid off the tank. Floating inside were...

"Hands?!" said Folgert, backing away a bit in reflex.

"An assortment of different sizes and shapes," said the tech, nodding.

Tiger began humming something. Vic needed a moment to recognize the tune as "Worms." She smirked, briefly, then very deliberately became serious. At least, on the outside.

"Why have hands separate?" said Barrow, outraged at this added complication. "Why have so many, especially when all the bodies in the tubes already have hands?"

"Maybe to have different fingerprints," said Tiger, shrugging, and interrupting his humming. "Maybe because hands are difficult and he needed multiple tries to get something satisfactory. These could all be rejects, considered unsuitable for some reason. In which case we'll probably find a bin of ears around here, somewhere."

Vic shuddered, briefly.

* * *

"Okay, while we still have had no direct contact," said Dr. Gorgeous, towards the end of another meeting of the Assembly, "we have more information on that island in the Strait of Georgia where The Super Battle Federation holds those super fights. While some parts of the enterprise seem to be slightly shady and others very difficult to learn about, the actual bouts are apparently legitimate and earn a great deal of money for super-related charities. Patrons can watch on a pay channel, or pay more and go to the island and sit in the actual arena. Only, many of the supers who have told someone they were going there have not appeared online or in the known cage matches. Also there have been a few supers who supposedly went there later turning up dead in civilian clothes and under other names at that body farm, with no clue as to how they got there. Bizarrely, some of the deceased supers are also apparently still competing in the matches! The suspicion is that if someone who died was popular enough, that after they died someone of similar build and abilities was given their costume to continue the matches."

"Do we have permission to go there, yet?" said Maciste.

"No. However, since both countries are refusing to accept responsibility for what happens there, we could probably just go. Something to keep in mind. The Bay Area Guardians are working to acquire current maps of the facility. For now all we have are the diagrams in their publicity documents, satellite photos, and some old information from the Sixties and earlier. Though keep in mind that any action against this institution could cause a cessation of the donation of funds they are currently giving to several worthy causes."

There was some general dissatisfied muttering at this.

"We are working with the Bay Area Guardians and some others on acquiring more info. They have already made a connection between The Super Battle Federation, which hosts the fights, and a local employment office in San Francisco which has been connected with some suspicious activities. Many of the clients of that business are supers who are known be members of the union the Super Combat Federation. They alerted the Bay Area Guardians to the disappearances of some of their members, which started the investigation. The Bay Area Guardians effort includes trying to locate supers known to have used this agency who actually have subsequently appeared in the fights. However, it seems it's very hard to verify they're all there of their own choice. Even those participating in the openly broadcast fights are difficult to contact."

"It's coming together," said Champion, with a sigh. "Slowly, but it's coming together."