There was a control on the remote that would seal up the hidden base and open a concealed rooftop exit, then close it after thirty seconds. Tracy discovered this by accident, but once she’d watched the process once she found she wasn’t at all surprised.

She made a note to herself to investigate all the other functions on the remote as soon as she had a chance, but there was something else right now that had to take priority. This person, this superhuman, who was calling her Mistress, who Vulcan had enslaved and controlled. There was no bigger problem to solve.

And no better opportunity. With a single order, the woman flew her home, carrying her in strong arms that were warm and soft in spite of the fact her flesh could shrug off bullets, blades, and bombs. Nothing about metahumanity made sense, Tracy thought, not even the things the scientists had ‘explained’.

Flying under your power - or someone else’s power, she supposed, but still - it was something completely different to being in an aircraft. There was something about the contact with the air, the slight chill offset by the woman’s warm embrace, and the view, complete and total, of the world below her. It was a rush, a sudden burst of euphoria and confidence.

The woman navigated almost perfectly; there were times when her speed would falter for a moment, then she would reorient and accelerate. All the same, it was just minutes before they landed on the balcony of Tracy’s home. Being fifteen stories up, Tracy didn’t keep her balcony locked; she let herself in and paused at the door. “Enter,” she instructed.

“Yes, Mistress,” the blonde answered, and the way she walked in was halfway between a saunter and a march. Power, Tracy thought, under complete control. And she shivered. The thought thrilled her, more than she was comfortable with, more than she was willing to think about. Not until she had to.

As soon as the balcony door was closed behind her visitor she demanded “Who are you?” But she had a good idea of the answer already; the lights in her penthouse were much brighter than those in the hidden base, and the faint sense she’d had that she recognised the other woman wasn’t just a faint sense anymore.

All the same, there was a short moment where she doubted, as the woman said “I am Alpha, Mistress.” That wasn’t the name she’d expected at all, and the logo on her breast and thighs was just the stylised V that Vulcan had sometimes employed.

After a moment’s thought she asked “Who gave you that name?”

“Vulcan, Mistress.” She hesitated, then, “My Master.”

“He’s been arrested,” Tracy said briskly. “He won’t be coming back.”

She watched a series of emotions struggle for dominance on the other woman’s face. Eventually, a note of uncertainty in her voice, the woman said “Could Mistress please tell me how I feel about this?”

“Let’s go with glad,” she said, and again there was a curious pleasure in seeing the warring expressions smooth out into a broad smile.

“Thank you, Mistress.”

“Does the name Hornet mean anything to you?” Tracy asked, and the other woman was silent for a long time.

“I think so, Mistress,” she said at last. There was none of the confidence there had been in the other answer. “She was a heroine.”

“She vanished some time ago,” Tracy said. “Nearly twenty-five years ago, in 1999.”

“In - wait.” The furrowed brow was somehow beautiful on this woman, that metahuman perfection annoyingly in evidence again. “What year is this, Mistress?”

“2023.”

The blonde fell silent. The smile was gone; there was something unreadable in its place. Tracy held her breath, the worry that whatever this was might break through whatever control Vulcan had inflicted being uppermost and unavoidable in her mind.

“I don’t understand, Mistress,” she finally offered. “It’s just coming up on the millennium.”

The tube she’d found her in must have kept her unaware of time somehow. Frozen, floating, preserved. “A lot has changed since your day, Hornet.”

The blonde nodded, and Tracy had to keep from showing her delight at the small trick working. She was making progress! “But… where have I been?”

“Tell me what you remember since Hornet disappeared,” Tracy said, and as the blonde straightened up into a posture of attention, her expression emptying, she felt that same thrill of power.

She didn’t feel this kind of thrill when they handed her an international megacorporation, for fuck’s sake. For whatever reason, controlling a superhuman was on a different level. Almost a sexual high.

“I am walking down a corridor,” Hornet said, her voice a slow, dreamy monotone. “My heels must touch the floor at exact half-second intervals. My left hand must keep the tray steady.

“I open the door at the end of the corridor and I step into a ballroom. A dozen or more villains are gathered there. I recognise most of them. Doktor von Kaos is closest.

“I walk up to him. My mouth is smiling. My eyes are empty. He takes one of the glasses from my tray and sips the champagne. I stand and wait. He smiles, pats my buttocks, and tells me to move on. He is a gentleman.

“Next nearest is the woman he was talking to. I don’t know her, but her costume is similar to his. She may be a protegee. She accepts her glass gracefully and strokes my cheek with her hand. I smile wider, as I must, and she laughs.”

Tracy felt a sudden regret for even asking the question. Listening to the recitation of the fallen heroine’s encounters with her foes was like intruding on her privacy, but she couldn’t stop listening either. It was fascinating.

“Mindtwister is also there, although he is wearing a power suppression device. He licks his lips when he sees me, and he does not take a glass but instead goes to his knees and runs his tongue across my bare hip, stroking my thighs.

“His thumb presses into my pussy through my costume, stroking hard in a way that might be intended to give pleasure or pain. The rules in charge of my expression means I simply smile. I make my way to Vulcan’s side and I stand there, smiling, as he puts his hand around my back and gropes one of my breasts.

“He starts a speech. I am not allowed to hear the words, but I see the villains listening, and smiling, and laughing.”

Tracy was trying to imagine it, and a part of her was trying to work out on what date this might have happened. Hornet had disappeared not long before Doktor von Kaos had united the villains of the time in his attempt to drown Earth in the Kaos Faktor. Had one of the bigger heroines of the time been present when that was decided? And had the young up and coming villain Vulcan had more to do with unifying those villains than anyone had believed?

The fallout from Doktor von Kaos’ last big scheme had been a huge event, and it felt in hindsight like it had led to a passing of the torch on both sides of the divide.

Where Hornet had been a huge name, Ms Miracle took her place; where the Varangian and Stormcaller had been the biggest names in male heroics before, Bulwark had gone from a rookie small-timer to someone everyone respected; and Vulcan and some other, harder-edged criminals had become the new faces of fear.

She had ceased to hear the words that Hornet was saying, thinking of the encounter she was describing with a different perspective. A business perspective.

They called the practice disruption, these days; it hadn’t really had a name back then. But it might as well have been a corporate takeover, with the old CEO outplayed and tricked into leaving his organisation vulnerable to buyout.

Just knowing Vulcan’s true identity had thrown new light on many of his stranger plans. In this case, knowing what she now knew, it underlined just how ruthless he had always been.

“…and I returned to the storage bath,” Hornet was saying. “Then I remember that I am in the air. The outfit I wear feels different against my skin. It is not the costume I designed myself. It covers more of my body. There is a visor over my eyes, and my hair is pulled back into a ponytail.

“When I crash into my target, nobody recognises me. I rise from my kneeling landing, brick fragments tumbling from me, and I see fear in the faces of the people there. I know some of these people. They know me. But they do not recognise me, or my actions.

“I tear the vault from the wall and I lift into the air. At San Ramon city limits, as ordered, I rip the door from the vault and let it fall, then change the direction in which I’m flying.

“I lift out the contents and let the vault drop into a lake. Then I change the direction in which I’m flying again.

“Vulcan is sitting waiting for me in his penthouse. He does not wear his armour but only a bathrobe. He smells of lemon and tea tree, freshly showered.

“I land five paces from him and take the document folder in my mouth. Then I drop to my knees and crawl the rest of the way.” Her voice, still monotone, had a husky quality to it now, and Tracy wasn’t sure if that was excitement or dehydration. She knew that she was listening with more excitement; with a frankly uncomfortable level of excitement.

“He takes the folder from me and puts it down on his desk. Then he opens his bathrobe and his cock is directly in front of my face. I cannot look away, as instructed. I feel myself getting wet as instructed. But I do nothing except wait.

“Vulcan tells me to suck, and I lean forward and take him in my mouth. I am instructed to enjoy whenever his cock is in me, wherever it is in me, and I am suddenly deeply, deeply aroused and needy. I feel like I am instructed to feel when I clean his loafers with my tongue.”

Which, Tracy noted, she hadn’t mentioned doing before; there were things she was doing that weren’t being included in her memories, perhaps, but which were still contained in her mind?

Vulcan’s technology maybe had some issues. Or maybe it just wasn’t designed for anyone to ask these questions; maybe they were questions he’d never seen the value in.

“Vulcan asks me if I was recognised, and I mumble no, Master around his cock. I think he understands, because he laughs and I feel him get harder in my mouth. He says this is good, and I’ll have a lot more work like that to do in the future.”

Finally, Tracy couldn’t help herself and interrupted, blurting out, “How did that make you feel?”

Hornet was silent for a long moment. “It excited me, Mistress,” she said in the end. “He knew something I was not allowed to know. He was laughing at me. Using me. And it was arousing.

“That is not something I’d experienced for situations like that before Hornet vanished.”

“Alpha,” she said. “Not Hornet.”

“Yes, Mistress. That explains it very nicely.”

Tracy found herself nodding thoughtfully. Then she sat back in her chair and sighed. “What do I do with you?” she asked rhetorically.

“Whatever you wish, Mistress.”

She looked back at the former heroine for a few moments longer, then laughed. “Yes,” she said. “I probably should have realised you’d look at this that way.”

*

HyperCorp was a demanding business to work with, but Tracy’s mind kept wandering through the next working day. The secret of the hidden villain lair was weighing on her; she didn’t have much time she could use to come forward about it without someone realising she’d held on to the secret for a while first.

At the same time, she wasn’t sure she wanted to hand it over to anyone else. Jason Castor had been a technological genius - not in the traditionally expected sense of developing new ideas and turning them into something unique, but in finding ways to steal from others and make something that looked new and revolutionary.

HyperCorp had profited from that, but Tracy was absolutely sure that he’d have gone further in his illegal ‘home’ projects. There was probably something there that she could use to make her term as CEO into a success.

Around lunchtime she heaved a deep sigh. “Sofia,” she said, “how much of the afternoon is meetings?”

“All of it, ma’am,” her assistant said, and while she had the good grace to sound apologetic, Tracy still didn’t want to hear that. She pulled a face. “How many could we move without a damn good excuse?”

Sofia was looking at the tablet with an awkward expression. Tracy was happier with that attempt to honestly answer the question than she would have been if her PA had just said they could be cancelled, or if none could be cancelled. Here was someone trying to give her an honest, accurate answer.

Then both of them became aware of a tapping at the window. It didn’t take long for either of them to think: This is the penthouse of a tall building.

They turned almost simultaneously to look at the window, and they saw hanging there a tall, powerful man, his ebony body almost perfectly that of a classical statue, his dark hair close-cropped and meticulously in place, the red and blue of his costume almost seeming to glow, although doubtless that was simply his own personal presence.

Paladin wasn’t the best known superhero in the world, but he was San Francisco’s own, and nobody who lived in the city would fail to recognise him. His expression was all but unreadable.

“…Hello,” Tracy said, turning and walking toward him. “Can you hear me?”

The man who stood on air nodded.

“Sofia,” Tracy said slowly, her eyes not leaving Paladin’s. “Would you say this constitutes a damn good excuse?”

“I’m… uh, that is… I’d say so, ma’am.”

“Right. Would you go let people know, then? And I’ll call you once this conversation is over.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Paladin nodded approvingly, a faint smile appearing on his face. He started to drift closer to the window, and Tracy made her way across and let him in.

“Welcome,” she said as he settled to the floor. It was strange, she thought, how often flying superhumans seemed to regard the ground as something that took effort to step back down to.

She’d have to ask Hornet why that was.

Actually, she had a lot she needed to ask Hornet…

She clamped down that train of thought.

“Thank you,” Paladin was saying. He clasped his hands behind his back; it felt from the body language like he was trying to appear inoffensive, reasonable, non-aggressive. This was no Bulwark, but he was someone who could set a worried city at peace just by showing up to deal with a situation.

"So… should I ask why you’re here?”

He sighed, walking across to the huge, heavy desk that Castor had had installed. Perhaps to his credit, he didn’t take the CEO’s seat, but stood awkwardly near one of the others. “I was hoping to have a discussion.”

She walked over to the desk and around it. After a moment of indecision, she sat. “Because of Vulcan,” she said.

Paladin sighed, and she knew instantly he hadn’t wanted to have to acknowledge that. “Yes,” he said all the same. “He has to have had connections here.”

“I’m… very aware of that fact, as I wouldn’t have been selected for this role if I wasn’t the least suspicious person in upper management,” she returned. “You can sit if you want.”

He gave her a fractional nod and sat. “I know investigations are happening already,” he said. “And by people better suited to investigating than me.”

There was nothing she felt would be smart to say there, so she just nodded. Paladin didn’t meet her eye.

“He was active for over twenty years,” he said. “And all that time he was in charge of this company. This multi-national.”

“And nobody realised,” she said. It wasn’t intended as a direct criticism of him, but the moment the words left her mouth she realised it could be, quite quickly. She could see his jaw clench.

This man was so careful about controlling how he appeared. So conscious of his image. She could be fairly sure he meant well, but the more she thought about it, the less confident she was she knew how he felt, what he thought. He might have a lot more anger toward Vulcan than she’d realised - and it might now point at the new CEO of HyperCorp.

“No,” he said. “Nobody realised. What I wanted, though, was to ask you something. Well, really, to ask you for help.”

“You want my help?”

“Sort of.” He looked at her, finally. “I’m sure it will turn out that Vulcan has done some things using this company. Stolen funds. Stolen research. Stolen property. Something like that. If your internal investigations turn it up before the police, all I’m asking for is that you also tell me when you tell the authorities.”

“Can I ask why? There’s got to be enough to put him away for.”

His attention seemed to sharpen on her and for a few heartstopping moments the idea that he could read her mind crossed her thoughts, before she realised that if he were able to read minds, Vulcan’s success would not have run nearly as long nor as far.

“Is there some reason you won’t just agree?” he asked, and Tracy felt something inside her snap.

“How about if I agree to give away company information sight unseen I could be fired and sued?” she retorted. “How about if it’s dubious but it’s not a crime, it could potentially just cause problems for employees duped into working on it?”

She glowered. “Or just because there’s plenty to do and anything incriminating is going to the cops anyway. I have to assume you’re tight with them.”

Paladin sat quietly for a moment, not even a muscle twitching in his face, before he sat back and raised both hands in defense. “Pax,” he said. “Yeah. I didn’t think about that.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” she said. “The stories I’ve heard about Jason Castor describe a good boss, but the stories I’ve heard about Vulcan aren’t someone who wouldn’t use every means at his disposal.

“But my job here is to make sure whatever’s left of HyperCorp at the end of this is still a viable business and that anyone who isn’t facing criminal prosecution still has somewhere to work. I can’t do that and prioritise telling you what’s happening, too.”

After a long moment, Paladin nodded again. “I understand. I hope you can understand in turn that I’ll be watching.”

“You don’t need to. But I understand that you will.” She paused. “Did you have anything else?”

He lifted his hands again, not actually saying Well, if that’s your attitude; all the same, she could practically hear him thinking it. “I suppose not.” He rose, and rose slightly into the air, floating rather than walking back toward the window. “Good luck with everything, Ms Hathor.”

It almost sounded genuine, but she was in high temper and had just concluded she couldn’t trust the face this man turned on the world. “Thank you,” she said levelly. “And good luck with the genuine threats to the city.”

After he’d departed, she stood there for a long moment, staring out of the window, her fists clenched. A tiny voice in the back of her head wanted her to take Hornet out of her tube and exercise power over her, exorcise the feeling of helpless frustration another superhuman had inspired; but Sofia would likely be back soon, and she didn’t want her assistant to discover the secret hidden in her office.

She decided to get ahead of the problem and went in search of Sofia.

*

Nobody seemed to have seen Sofia after she delivered the initial news of meeting cancellations, and it took cornering David, PA to one of the other Board members, to find out that when Sofia couldn’t be found, she was usually on an unscheduled smoke break.

These turned out to take place in the building’s fire escape stairs. Tracy had sighed and gone in search of her assistant, her temper just about back in check after it had risen so high for the end of the conversation with Paladin.

Sofia wasn’t immediately visible, but she could hear her; her voice, but not her words. She’d gone a couple of floors down.

Tracy listened for a few moments longer, not hearing anyone else when Sofia fell silent. Either she was talking to herself or she was on the phone.

Slowly, Tracy made her way down the stairs, ears primed and very, very curious.

“…she’s found something,” Sofia was saying. “I’m sure of that much. But there’s only so much digging I can do when I’ve got to be by her side. If you can get her invited out to one of the manufacturing plants…”

She fell silent, listening. “Sir. I can only do so much. If I tell her she’s expected out there, she’ll be looking for someone who wanted her there. She’s not blind, she’ll notice if they’re running scared rather than working their own angle. I need someone to get them to-“

“Yes, sir.” Sofia sighed. “Alright. I can try…”

But Tracy had turned back, and was moving back up the stairs as quietly as she could, biting down on her lip, fists clenched.

Paladin wanted her to jeopardise her job to help him. Sofia wasn’t really assisting her, she was working for one of the Board.

She’d already known she was being set up to fail, but now it was starting to feel like people were making sure of it.

Alright, she told herself quietly. You think I’m a problem? You have no idea how big a problem I can be.

She emerged back into her office and picked up the remote. I don’t even know how big a problem I can be.