Mostly they called Terry Wilson ‘sir’, whether they worked for him or not. He had been a big, powerful man as a youth, and while in his late sixties his physical presence was starting to recede, he sill immediately made impressions on any who saw him.

That was why people who didn’t know Terry called him sir. The people who knew him - aside from his closest confidantes, his eldest child, and his wife - called him sir because he had been, until recently, the second most powerful man in HyperCorp; he also owned enough shares in many local startups to exercise an effective controlling interest.

“That’s why I’m in charge,” he’d often said, passing it off as a joke with with his bluff manner. “Everyone knows it. Money. Money put me in charge. I like to think I make decisions that are smarter than the average now I’m there, though.”

Very few people liked Terry Wilson, whether they called him sir or not. There weren’t many people who liked dealing with a sociopath holding their future in their hands, and in San Francisco, Terry Wilson could pull a lot of strings when he didn’t make decisions about you directly. But the one thing that was universally agreed about him was that everyone knew everything you needed to know about him.

The main thing that almost nobody knew about Terry Wilson was that he had known Jason Castor’s secret almost since he joined HyperCorp, and had in fact been a confidante and almost an advisor to Vulcan as much as to Castor.

He was confident there were items belonging to Vulcan somewhere on the property, but Castor had never told him where. Terry Wilson had spent days trying to decide which way to lean, with all of that information taken into account, and had simply arranged to have Castor’s temporary replacement shadowed while he made his decision.

It was more than a little frustrating that the bitch suddenly wasn’t answering his calls.

Like many men whose temper drove their decisions, Terry Wilson considered himself a reasonable man. He would have accepted, he told himself, a series of deferential but uninformative answers to his calls from the Aguilar woman, just so long as she kept him as updated as she could.

A lack of answers entirely indicated something else. It gave Wilson almost no information, and only asked questions. This, he would have told her, was not how things were supposed to go. This was not how she could protect her career from the threat of blackballing, how she could ensure she continued to be paid, or even allowed to remain in the apartment she rented.

Wilson had spent the afternoon stewing on this, becoming more and more angry. He had only the rough structure of a plan, and so he wasn’t sure what steps to take next; all the same, his biggest meal ticket was in jail awaiting trial with no possibility of bail, the business he had invested most heavily in was affected by the news, and Terry Wilson was not accustomed to being put into a situation where his actions and decisions could not benefit him.

He was far from convinced that he couldn’t fix this situation, if he only knew what to do.

Not for the first time, he asked himself why Jason Castor had never been willing to give him a Vulcan suit of his own. It would solve so many problems.

*

Hornet was puzzled.

None of her puzzlement showed on her face - not that there was much of her face to see, now that it was buried between the thighs of her Mistress and slick with the juices of a delighted woman and her own slavish saliva.

She wasn’t puzzled that she was, again, being used for sex while under control - her experience with Vulcan had made it clear that this, if not exactly part of the job description, something that you could reliably expect would happen.

Instead, she was puzzled that her body was responding this time; it wasn’t just that her pussy had become wet, but she could actually feel the excitement this time. No question but that she was aroused; the noises escaping her Mistress’ dignity were exciting, and she found herself getting into her tongue-worship of her Mistress’ pussy in a way she never had when sucking her Master’s cock.

For Vulcan still was her Master; the means he’d used to control her simply meant that her Mistress had been able to take the reins as well.

Hornet wanted to explore her new desires. Her nipples were aching with desire and arousal, and she wanted more than anything else to toy with them, tease them, tug and caress and squeeze and descend further into the pleasure she was floating around the edge of.

She wanted to do many things. But unless she was told to, she couldn’t.

This was the most Hornet had thought about anything since her Mistress first reactivated her. She’d spent more time wondering how she could be allowed to please herself than she had wondering why someone would choose the year 2023 if they were making up a date in the future, or what it would mean if the Mistress was telling the truth.

Not that the Mistress needed to tell Hornet the truth. Hornet would obey; the implant in her spine saw to that. Hornet could not disobey.

It was simply new for that obedience to feel like a good thing, and she didn’t know what it meant that it was. The Mistress didn’t seem certain either, hadn’t even seemed certain about sex, but after the kiss, it had been all but inevitable that there would be more orders.

And it was, of course, completely inevitable that Hornet would obey those orders.

The tone of the Mistress’ gasps and sighs was changing, the rhythm picking up. Hornet felt the other woman’s thighs tighten around her, not that it was any kind of danger for a superhuman. Urgency overtook her, tending eagerly to the pussy in her face, her own pussy wishing it was full of… of… well, of anything, just to make the most of the way she finished.

The Mistress’ legs twitched repeatedly as Hornet’s tongue brought her closer and closer to cumming, enough so that it became a good indicator of just how close she was. Hornet stopped thinking about anything else, even her own desires, and focused entirely on bringing pleasure to her Mistress, the last thing she had been ordered to do, the command it was currently her entire programming to obey.

Her hands remained exactly where they were, even as desires almost as primal as instincts pushed for her to grope herself, to give her body something to grind against so she could catch the Mistress up; except for her breathing and her tongue, Hornet was entirely still, her entire existence focused on the bliss of another.

It wasn’t the first time.

*

1996

The month of October had started unseasonably hot and it just seemed to get warmer that week. It was unusual enough, omnipresent enough, and oppressive enough that everyone commented on it.

Not everyone would ever know why, but Molly Vesper, better known to most as Hornet, had put two and two together just a couple of hours earlier, alongside her confidante and friend, Dr. Alex Morozova.

Morozova was one of those brilliant polymaths who seemed completely unlike anyone else in science, moving effortlessly from discipline to discipline and producing, good, insightful, and pioneering work in each one. She knew Molly only as Hornet, and considered herself almost a partner to the heroine, “providing in brains what she provides in brawn.”

Molly wasn’t particularly happy with that phrasing, but she didn’t mind her friend saying how valuable she was - after all, she was; without her, Hornet still would have no idea that Calefactor was behind this; in fact, probably wouldn’t have stopped to think Calefactor might even be involved or even remember he’d once been active.

Now she just needed to find him, but fortunately that was also something she had an advantage in; whatever Calefactor was after, they didn’t think he was ready to actually do it yet. He was just prepping his equipment, gaining the power he needed, ready for whatever scheme it actually was.

It was just that, with his lair in the city, the city was starting to gently toast in the overflow heat.

Calefactor was an older villain, thought to be somewhere in his fifties; he’d made a name for himself in the early seventies, when he’d unleashed three or four plots for world domination in surprisingly quick succession, seemingly just slipping in and out of prison without seeing it as an obstacle.

After the last of them, he’d disappeared, more or less completely forgotten - except that the remnants of the weather control apparatus he’d built had helped researchers to better understand weather prediction and identify a whole extra string of chemicals that depleted the ozone layer. His real name had never been publicised, so there were scientific papers citing the practical work of Calefactor as being important prior art.

It hadn’t been until the trial after his third outing that anyone had bothered to explain the name; an old term for something that made heat, it punned on an equally old term for a criminal. In the fifties through the seventies that was more than enough for a villain to name themselves with; the fact nobody understood the word wasn’t relevant.

“It’s like an extra brag,” Morozova had put it. “Look at me, I know my science and I probably speak a little Latin.”

“Wow,” Hornet had deadpanned. “Is this the sort of thing that makes those fools at the Institute laugh at someone?”

Morozova had just looked at her.

Hornet hung in the air above the skyline, looking down at the city spread out below, comparing it to the gadget she held in her hand. The whole purpose of this gadget was to track Calefactor’s equipment, literally identifying hotspots across the city.

She didn’t really need to double-check, but she liked to. It made it a whole lot less likely that she’d screw up in a way that could screw with the innocent, but it also let her hang there a little longer.

If she could draw out her time in the air without endangering the public, Molly always would. When the incident happened - she was never entirely sure if the dart hitting her with the serum had been the accident that was claimed - discovering she could fly had been the best thing, a euphoria it hurt that she couldn’t even tell her friends about, let along make them understand.

She wondered why Calefactor was even back; after that first brief flurry of attempts, he’d vanished as so many forgettable supervillains did, relegated to an answer in a particularly morbid quiz show. Hadn’t been seen in probably 25 years.

Usually that meant they’d never be heard of again.

She had her target building identified. The gadget clipped back onto her belt at the hip and she swooped down, a graceful arc being travelled at a speed most things just couldn’t.

Hornet always went for doors; there was more risk of being boobytrapped, but she had the resilience to shrug off most of them. If she went through a wall whoever rightly owned the building was going to be spending plenty on repairing it. And besides, there had been that time, in the early eighties, where the Varangian had gone through a wall that turned out to be load-bearing.

The doors here were steel-cased, and the steel itself was warm; the lock gave easily at impact, the metal stretching a little before snapping like a taffy pull. Inside, the building had been more or less cleared out; there were just the edges of what had been interior walls poking out, an office building’s first three floors hollowed out. Inside was not one giant machine but five bulky stacks, each of them crackling with electricity from several points studded around that were either conducting or generating electricity; it was hard to tell which.

The room itself was ridiculously hot; Hornet felt her mouth dry, her skin prickling with the heat. It wouldn’t be long before she was covered in a thin sheen of sweat.

There didn’t seem to be a person visible. She crossed to the centre of the room, by the biggest of the stacks, and looked up.

There were persistent rumours that some superhumans could see through walls. At times like this, Hornet would love to be one of them, to have the tools she needed to see where there was an actual person in the building, overseeing everything.

Since that wasn’t an option, she followed what looked like the thickest group of cables up through the centre of the ‘room’s ceiling, taking out a chunk of the flooring as she rose up.

The next floor felt even hotter, and Hornet was aware that as well as her forehead and her torso, the hair on the back of her head was slick with perspiration here. Even for a superhuman, breathing was harder. But the other thing she saw felt just as important.

There were stacks of technology here, too, with the cables from below obviously feeding into them. And that technology looked different.

Costumed heroes rapidly developed a sense for this. Aside from the occasional, more organisation-style villainy they faced, the technology they saw was either something everyone had access to or it was a prototype. It might have shielding or an outer decorative case, but it hadn’t gone through a design committee; it looked the way the person building it thought it should look. It followed their sense of aesthetics.

And the technology on this level hadn’t been built with Calefactor’s sense of aesthetics. Which meant, willingly or not, he was working for someone else.

Molly realised almost immediately that this meant Morozova had been wrong; her friend had assumed Calefactor was stockpiling heat as a byproduct of his own work. Now it looked like the heat was a byproduct of powering something else, someone else’s creation. Which meant the question was, whose? And what was it going to do?

She approached this stack carefully, wondering about contacting Morozova. The problem was, cell phones were too bulky to work well with her costume; she’d have to find a payphone.

This wasn’t the design of someone she knew, she decided, studying it closely. But if it needed this much power, it would definitely have ramifications for the city or more, whatever it was.

“You better not be a bomb,” she mused aloud toward the pile.

There was a small control plate set into it. Molly squinted at the controls, looking for anything marked POWER or OFF or RESET or ABORT, but there wasn’t anything so obvious.

The background hum of machinery changed tone slightly. She’d stopped noticing the sound until the shift; now she was instantly on guard. Something was about to happen and she couldn’t imagine it was something she was going to like.

One of the lights on the control plate blinked off and the one next to it clicked on just as quickly. It might be a countdown, or it might indicate some other adjustment; the new light was nearer the left, so Molly figured it would probably be a slightly lower setting, maybe lower intensity or lower radius, as most locals read from left to right.

She was looking over the buttons again, trying to decide whether to take the risk on one of the controls since something was obviously happening, when it let out a sudden series of clicks, followed by a strange electronic shriek.

It was like auditory static, and it filled her hearing just as effectively as static filled a screen. Hornet winced, raising a hand toward her ear, before she felt an answering, pseudo-electronic shriek stirring in the back of her skull, near the top of her spine. They weren’t quite in time or in tune, but the peaks and troughs of sound were startlingly similar.

It was like the sound in her head was a response to the sound she was hearing, a conversation she was not part of.

The incoming sound reached a peak, and Hornet realised she hadn’t moved in several seconds. She tried to lower her raised arm and found she couldn’t.

What was this?

As abruptly as it had begun, the electronic shrieking ended, the echo in her head dying off too. Silence reigned, both outside her head and in.

Hornet was simply stood in place. It wasn’t by choice, or not by her choice; it was something that had been done to her.

The light on the control board chun-chicked back to the original one, but as it did so, another light winked on, flashing slowly, on for a second then off for a second. Not an indicator light, not part of a bank of lights, just a single red LED.

It was, Molly thought, probably some kind of alert.

She didn’t like that idea much. Not when she couldn’t move.

…There was something else, though, faint but growing clearer and louder. Like the second of the electronic wails, it seemed to be coming from inside her head, at the base of her skull. At first she thought it would be more of the electronic noise, but then she started to make out voices.

“Ma’am? We have an intruder in the San Francisco centre.”

“So hack them, the bio-modem’s online.”

“I don’t need to, ma’am. Automated response actually worked.”

“Oh? Excellent. So what have we caught? Another homeless bum?”

“Checking now, ma’am.”

Hornet found herself turning away from the device. She marched stiffly toward a corner of the room, and as she did so lights flickered into operation overhead, shedding light not only on her but on a security camera set into the corner, the red light of which flicked on. She had a sense of being just one cog in a wider machine, as much under control as everything else in this building.

“I think that’s a super, ma’am.”

“Oh, that she is. Look at that body…” There was a sound Molly could only describe as a cackle. “I’m going to have fun with her.”

The other voice, the male voice, sounded distinctly more uncomfortable when it spoke again. “I’m… sure, ma’am.”

“Run a whois lookup on her.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Molly felt something moving through her memories, flicking through all the information in her brain piece by piece. “Do you want her civilian or heroic ID?”

“Heroic. Who cares about that other stuff? As a person she’s a nobody. As a super, she’s interesting.”

“The lookup says she’s Hornet, ma’am. Local to San Francisco I think, but she’s definitely made national news a few times.”

“Fine, fine. I just wanted a name. Have her show her tits.”

There was a different tone, somehow, to the silence in the conversation in her head. After a few moments she found herself reaching up and grabbing the top of her bodysuit with both hands.

Her bodysuit had a zipper down the back. If she wanted to bare her breasts, she had to unzip and pull the suit down below them, probably taking her arms out of the sleeves as well. Instead she jerked both hands sharply aside, ripping the collar of her suit, then pulled down, continuing the tear until the material had parted enough that she could reach inside, taking each breast in hand in turn, and pull first one bra cup and then the other out on display.

Then she slipped her thumb and forefinger either side of the bridge of her bra and snapped her fingers, the fabric parting under her strength, the cups of her bra springing open from the energy of the snap, her breasts now bare on camera. Her hands stopped moving exactly where they had been.

“Beautiful,” the woman said. “Give me a clearer look.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Now Molly found herself opening her hands flat, then placing them under her breasts, lifting them to the watching eye of the camera as if her hands were a presentation tray.

“I’ve seen all I need to. Bring her here. It’s a little early to tip our hand, maybe, but we’ll need superdrones before the Justice Guard work out what we’re doing. Maybe we can even use this one to open a biomodem connection in their HQ.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Molly was already turning, lifting from the ground for flight. She accelerated toward a window, smashing through it bare-chested, her superhuman physique only noticing the shattering glass she passed through for the thin, delicious lines of sensation it briefly stitched across her impervious skin.

*

It had been Morozova’s device that led to her rescue, she remembered. She’d flown halfway across the States before landing, and she’d been put to work immediately, not for her superpowers but for her tongue and her fingers.

At the time, she remembered a deep frustration and a burning embarrassment. Looking back on it now, as she continued to worship her Mistress, all she could feel was excitement.

What was happening to her?

*

Terry Wilson had sent his chauffeur home early. It had been over twenty years since he last drove himself, but for something like this, he couldn’t have witnesses.

The car, he discovered, was much better than the last one he’d driven. Technology had clearly advanced; the steering was more responsive, the brakes more effective, the accelerator, once he was confidently using it to its full, faster to bring the vehicle up to speed.

It was a delight, powering something this well engineered, this capable, around the roads outside the city. He was up in the hills, going fast without worrying about the turns, heading for Castor’s summer home.

He had finally reached the point of frustration where matters needed to be taken into his own hands, and had wavered between three options; confronting Aguilar, confronting Hathor, or the path he was now on.

He had attempted, first, to confront Aguilar, but had been unable to reach her; the team on reception reported that she’d gone in to speak with Hathor and hadn’t been heard from again for the next several hours. He’d considered bursting in on them both, and it certainly was not caution or fear that had prevented him. Instead he had, quite rationally, decided to put an old theory to the test.

Parking in the drive of Castor’s summer house, he walked slowly around the outside, studying the building, deep in thought.

Eventually he opened the trunk of the car, took out the toolkit, and walked across to the hurricane shelter hatch. It was like Castor to be prepared, certainly, but the number of storms making landfall in the state wasn’t high, and usually they brought flash flooding more than anything else - not something the shelter would help with.

The padlock gave easily under the right tools, and he pulled the chain away from the handles. The doors were heavier than he’d been ready for and, as he felt the pain begin in his shoulders, he briefly wished he’d kept his chauffeur with him.

Then the door reached the peak of its arc and fell away, and the automatic lighting came in in the room below, and Terry Wilson saw the outline of a Vulcan suit, and he smiled to himself.

Maybe doing everything through flunkies was overrated.

Maybe it was time to solve some problems personally.