There were, the heroine known as Hornet knew, several reasons she should be concerned.

The control chip implanted in the back of her head was top of the list. For months, now, the chip had rendered her obedient to Tracy Hathor, the new CEO of HyperCorp.

For years before that, she had spent most of her time suspended in an experimental biogel in a transparent cylinder, the whole construct just part of the concealed villainous lair of the man known as Vulcan, which was placed directly between the penthouse suite of HyperCorp Tower and the apparent floor below.

She had been let out of the cylinder only a handful of times after the chip was implanted, and each of those outings had been so that she could be used to steal something Vulcan wanted or to destroy something Vulcan would prefer didn’t exist.

During her suspension, time had passed as if in a dream. It had not always been clear to her that time was passing, especially when the lair was unoccupied and thus almost unlit (it had taken the first month of freedom from the cylinder before the green dot in the lower left of Hornet’s field of vision, burned in by years of directly facing a small status LED surrounded by darkness, had finally cleared).

The chip had gone in not long before her first trip into the cylinder. Before that was nearly fifteen years of superheroes, including for the last little while of that period steady conflict with Vulcan, to the point that the two of them had been known as nemeses.

Everything that had happened since certainly should have been a source of concern.

She had lost the opportunity for anything more with her long-term lover; she had born his child without giving in to his not-infrequent proposals, and she had steadfastly avoided letting him learn that her real name was Alexandra. Once Hornet disappeared, he knew he had a son somewhere in the city but had no way to find him; a few years into Hornet’s imprisonment he had moved all the way to Alaska, where he’d met and married another woman. Three children, now, according to the Internet. She didn’t like to think how much it could damage his life if she turned up on his doorstep.

She had been denied the chance to see her son Milo Mack grow up, help him navigate the ways of women as he started to date, to support him against peer pressure or even to help him understand his own powers as they emerged. She’d even missed his wedding, though not the birth of any grandchildren, although Mistress was encouraging the pair of them to breed.

That was something else she should have been concerned about. Part of the chain of events following Vulcan’s downfall and Hathor’s discovery of the lair where Hornet was kept had led to Hathor getting control over Hooded Hawk, the costumed identity of her son’s wife Annie, and over her son in turn. This was not an ideal situation, needless to say.

There were almost certainly still other lairs belonging to Vulcan - who had turned out to be Jason Castor, HyperCorp’s founder and CEO - out there with other tools or weapons he’d devised. Two had been found so far, but she knew better than almost anyone how much he loved redundancy. She should have been concerned over that, too.

The chip ensured that she wasn’t actually worried about any of these. Mistress hadn’t instructed her to be.

Hornet privately thought that she wasn’t concerned about her Mistress for reasons other than the chip. She had played a key role in her Mistress’ sexual awakening, which had not been intentional on her part; still, she had learned that for Tracy Hathor power over another person was a tremendous aphrodisiac, one which overcame a disinterest, otherwise, in her own and others’ sensuality. She had learned this either at the same time as Hathor or (she would have guessed) a few moments’ ahead of her every step of the way.

On the other hand, she was free again, in every sense except for her will. Rather than return to the cylinder after infrequent missions, she spent her days out and about in the skies above San Francisco, and late at night she usually joined her Mistress in their bed, if her son, daughter-in-law or Hathor’s brainwashed and genetically altered former PA hadn’t been chosen instead.

Thinking about that, she smiled thinly to herself. Hathor had assembled a quite unusual harem, but a Bay Area CEO with a secret polyamorous commune around her wasn’t necessarily so surprising.

At that moment, she was sitting on the edge of the roof of the Transamerica Pyramid eating a late lunch, her ankles crossed as they dangled from her perch.

She’d been in the habit of taking any meal she ate in costume up to this rooftop before the chip ever entered her life, and she certainly saw no reason to change that just because there was a taller building on the skyline nowadays; it was a good place to enjoy a breakfast sandwich, burrito, or in wintry weather, a grilled cheese and a paper cup of cheap, warming tomato soup.

She wasn’t supposed to be thinking about her family drama, however soap-operatic it had become now that everyone she was close to was either a superhuman or a multi-millionaire. (Mistress expected to become a billionaire by the end of the year. It was, arguably, her worst characteristic, unless you counted enslaving the wills of others to her whim, which Hornet had been instructed did not count when Mistress did it.)

What she was supposed to be thinking about was the Ophidian Circle. Thirteen half-snake, half-men with uncanny powers, the Circle had been around when she got started and were still a going concern, specialising in elaborate long-term plots. As most of their membership possessed mesmeric powers, these plots often involved subversion of some major business or government function in order to divert its assets toward their ends, and were usually invisible until near the endgame unless you stumbled on them by chance.

Such a chance had happened three days earlier, when a woman was admitted to hospital presenting with a case of advanced poisoning. Tests showed this to be the result of boomslang venom, but the bitemarks didn’t fit a snake’s mouth; however, a human head equipped with four snakelike fangs would create just such a pattern of punctures.

This meant one of the Ophidian Circle was present. It was not unheard of for them to work alone, but it was far more likely that they were operating as a group. In either case, they had plans, and those plans had to do with some group within San Francisco.

Hornet had taken it upon herself to investigate. There was enough to do in the city to keep all four of the Mistress’ controlled heroes and heroines busy, and while she wasn’t concerned, her internal thoughts about her son and daughter-in-law’s situation rose as high as discomfort. Discomfort turned out to be enough to keep her from bringing either of them in on the case.

That left Harrier, the winged birdwoman who at one point had been Hathor’s PA. She was only freshly a heroine, however, and much less powerful (and resilient) than Hornet, and as such the older woman wasn’t keen to ask her to tag along. Not with a group that occasionally gave the Justice Guard problems.

She would just have to do it alone, as much as she hated this kind of investigation. She thought, fleetingly, of Milo’s father. He had been a policeman; they’d met when she was a fledgling heroine and he was a rookie cop, freshly assigned to the beat. He had often been the one whose intuition or contacts took her to the point where she had something to fight.

Either the department had changed while she was unaware, or public attitudes to it had. She wasn’t sure which, but she would prefer not to involve the police in this. The thought made her angry and she wasn’t sure why; something to consider later.

For now, she was busy.

Her lunch was long finished, the foil her burrito had been wrapped in balled up tight. She placed it against the brickwork and smoothed her hand out over it, flattening it into a sheet, and dropped from her perch into the sky.

She let herself fall four stories before willing her power of flight into activity, catching her downward momentum immediately. Tucking the foil sheet into the side of a windowbox, she started to fly out over the city, turning over what she knew in her mind.

The bite victim had worked for a private security firm. That almost certainly meant she’d suffered her snakebite in the line of her work, which made it a useful clue. On the other hand, a large security firm probably had dozens of simultaneous jobs on, didn’t it?

She considered asking them nicely for a list of their current customers. It probably wouldn’t work - people who hired security firms liked their contractual privacy - but might be worth a try. Her name had meant something in San Francisco once; it might still open some doors.

She flew over toward the firm’s headquarters.

*

It was nice to be out on the coast again, Vivian thought. This was the first time she’d seen it only through the high-tech visor that still kept many people believing that Mercy was, in fact, an android.

Privately she thought that view made sense for San Francisco more than her own stomping grounds just north of Memphis, but there you were; Master had no intention of leaving Memphis, preferring to operate in a city where as few people as possible might guess that the leader of the new organised crime powerhouse had superhuman powers. Mercy might go anywhere, but Vivian had no intention of being far from her Master for any longer than she had to.

It was hard now to understand why she’d been so dismissive of Ms Miracle’s mind control kink, simply because she’d lived under the effects of a duplicate for so long. The rush of pleasure she got whenever she had a command to obey was fantastic, but what she hadn’t foreseen was the comfort and the peace that came in knowing there was a place she could go where making decisions, distracting herself, even thinking, were unnecessary. Where she could instead sit or kneel or stand at attention and time would pass by with her simply contented.

As a villain, Macabre (a name she was becoming more comfortable thinking about again, now that Mercy was somewhat better established) had been driven primarily by ambition and pride. She still had these, but they manifested themselves very differently; her pride was in the pleasure she brought her Master, while her ambition now channeled itself into becoming as well known and respected a heroine as Ms Miracle, where once she had been considered that same heroine’s equal as a villainess.

Thoughts of Amy reminded her. She twitched her jaw and a sensor built into the chin of her helmet was activated. A green telltale lit up on the right hand side of her visor, telling her that the suit’s comm system was online. “Call Ms Miracle,” she directed it, and a few moments later was listening to the pulsed flat tones of the Justice Guard comm system.

She still wasn’t really supposed to have access to that system. Thankfully they were mostly sensible people, and accepted that she wasn’t trying to trick anyone, but she knew Bulwark didn’t like thinking about the fact Mercy had been brainwashed to the side of good, let alone that two of his team had been instrumental in brokering the deal.

“Mercy?” Amy asked. “Is anything wrong?”

“Probably not,” she said cheerfully. “I’m in San Fran right now. Going to have a word with Hornet.”

“Oh? Did you ever-”

“Nothing special,” she said. “She disappeared not long after I got started. We crossed paths. Nothing to remember.”

“Then why?”

“Weird story. Possibly nothing. But I’m checking in, just in case it’s not.”

“If you disappear or start acting weird, the trail starts in San Fran and Hornet has something to do with it,” Amy replied. “Got it.”

“Thanks, hon.”

“No problem, babe. I can be there in no time if the problem turns out to need even more punching.”

“Appreciate it. See you.”

It was interesting, Mercy thought, that now they felt comfortable enough to be openly flirtatious with one another, they probably spent less time flirting than they had as enemies.

She hadn’t realised, and she didn’t think Miracle had either. But then one day she found a music video on YouTube someone had edited together from the publicly broadcast parts of several of their battles. It had been eye-opening to say the least.

Mercy cared much more about her image than Macabre had, but Macabre had been much more active in maintaining hers. There was probably a lesson in there somewhere.

She toggled the chin button again, cycling through until she got a search prompt. “Hornet, San Francisco,” she said. “Keyword ‘sighting’, sort by recency.”

It didn’t always work - if someone was going near their top speed they were all but untrackable, especially for people using the naked eye or their phone camera. But it worked at least some of the time, and that made it foolish not to try.

In this case it actually worked excellently, and she quickly identified a cluster of sightings within the past half hour, all in one part of the city. She headed in that direction herself, and in just a few minutes she was rewarded by the sight of the heroine emerging from the side door to a low-set building into a parking lot, both of them surrounded by a chainlink fence.

She’d been going at cruising speed, the better to pick out specific details, but slowed anyway to a near halt just above the fence. She re-activated the helmet’s concealed external speakers. “Excuse me,” she said. “It’s Hornet, right? I’d like to - shit!”

The shit had come out after the heroine looked glassily up at her, snarled and launched into the air after her. Mercy tried to dodge to one side, but the other woman’s acceleration was faster. She was caught by the wrist and Hornet twisted in midair, throwing her over her shoulder past the parking lot into the chain link on the far side, which burst apart on her impact with it, leaving her to clip her hip on the point where a van’s side became it’s roof and tumble over the other side, landing on all fours.

She was shaking her head to clear it when she heard the telltale crump of a superhuman landing hard and fast on a vehicle rood. Looking up, she saw Hornet stood above her, feet planted wide apart, elbows in by her side, hands outstretched, fingers clawed into talons.

Anger, she read in the other woman’s body language, but also a complete lack of fighting skills. And she knew that wasn’t true.

Hornet was on her regardless, a heartbeat later, throwing punches. Mercy blocked some with a raised wrist, deflected others with an open palm, feinted to the side of others. The other woman fought with a fury that would have been familiar to Macabre but wasn’t at all Mercy’s style. And yet it was, somehow, a leashed fury.

She caught one of Hornet’s wrists in her own grip. As the other woman tried to wrench away, Mercy realised she was the stronger of the two.

A fragment of speech floated through her mind, a memory from early on in her time with Master. “You will consider civilian life sacred. It needs to be protected.”

Catching Hornet’s other hand as she went in for a punch, Mercy realised this combat needed to be taken out of the city.

She took off, towing the other woman up. It’s always been difficult to explain, to those of us who have never experienced it, how it feels when someone you’re holding as you fly tries to fly in the other direction. For however long both fliers are straining against each other, it’s more like a battle of wills, but one in which your movement may vary wildly from what you expect, sending you in directions you hadn’t wanted.

So it was for Mercy and Hornet. Both were stubborn, to say the least, and both came from a position where they naturally - and quite reasonably - assumed themselves the physical equal to any challenge they might face.

As they rose into the air they heterodyned, spinning around each other first one way and then the other, as each of them sought to build up the momentum they’d need to win the struggle.

Mercy had actually had other intentions from the start, however, and as soon as they hit a particular height she let go of the other woman, using her own power and momentum against her, sending her hurtling toward city limits. She took a half-second to reorient and collect her own thoughts - just about long enough for Hornet to start braking in the air - and hurtled toward her, fists balled.

She crashed into Hornet fist-first just as the blonde was collecting herself. It was a solid punch from one of the strongest superhumans in the world, a punch that had made Stormcaller check himself in the past. It sent Hornet flying backward again, just as she’d expected.

What she hadn’t expected was for the other woman to have the speed, grace and presence of mind to catch her by the wrist as she was flung backwards. The two of them were hurtling together, well outside city limits now, as Hornet pulled Mercy closer in, wrapping an arm around her neck to clamp her into a headlock.

That, Mercy thought, was ridiculous; it was clear to her now, and had to be clear to both of them, who had the strength advantage. It wouldn’t take her long to break free -

Hornet had managed to alter their course. Not by much - the laws of physics are surprisingly strict when it comes to momentum at high speed - but it didn’t need to be much. It was enough that Mercy was the one who hit the tree, face-first, and the headlock had lasted long enough to stop her doing anything about it.

The tree started slowly toppling over behind them; parted by the impact both of them hit the ground not so much rolling as bouncing, covering the ground with juddering impacts one after another, six feet or more apart, as if some cosmic giant were skipping them across the forest floor like stones on a lake.

Hornet recovered herself a fraction more quickly, arresting her movement with flight, simply refusing to continue moving in the arcing bounces one moment longer and hanging there instead. She reoriented and was on Mercy a heartbeat later, crashing into her with a flying double-footed kick that drove the other heroine back even as she dug her feet into the ground.

Hornet’s eyes, Mercy saw, were still strangely glassy. Again Mercy had that sense of this woman as raging, but not using her rage well. Maybe it was the years she’d been off? Grabbing Hornet by one ankle she whirled around in a huge arc, delivering the other heroine into a tree with a crashing impact, and then she realised - no, this had nothing to do with her time off.

She lunged forward, catching her opponent by the foot once more, calculated a direction by guesswork, and hurled her overhand, then surged forward in the same path herself, bodychecking her flying opponent further forward. Branches whipped across them both at speed as they gained height, rising in a steady arc. Mercy poured on the speed, relying on her physical capabilities, hoping she could move the other woman faster than Hornet could recover.

It took two or three more drives in the same direction as Hornet recovered in between times, but in time they arced back out over inhabited ground - and then over no ground at all - and then the two of them crashed into the bay together.

Mercy held Hornet under for a half a minute or so, then reversed direction, shooting up while still holding her.

She set her down in the middle of an open field a half mile or so inland and waited for the spluttering to finish.

*

When it did, Hornet raised herself up on one elbow, squinted up at the ‘android’ standing above her, and said “You going to hit me again?”

“If I have to,” she said. “Feeling better yet?”

“I think so. I got hit by an eye gaze, I think. Told to deal with any problems while they cleaned out.” The blonde heroine half-smiled. “It’s the Ophidian Circle.”

“Oh, those dickheads,” Mercy said. She couldn’t help smiling, remembering what she’d said in a similar situation to Maxine Power. It was a good thing her visor hid her expression. “You’re probably still carrying a deep posthypnotic or two.”

“Thanks for the tip.” The older heroine picked herself up off the ground and dusted her costume off. “What gave me away?”

“I, uh…” She was blushing now, and even more glad her visor kept her secrets. “I have some experience with being reprogrammed. And what I’ve heard of you says you should be a better fighter than that.” She gave it a moment. “Assuming you are who everyone thinks you are, of course.”

Hornet snorted in amusement. “I think you can safely assume that,” she said. “Still catching up, though. Should I recognise you immediately?”

Mercy appreciated how delicately this request for an introduction had been phrased. People who hit as hard as she did often came with egos to match, and not being recognised might set them off. “Not unless you follow Tennessee news,” she said, and held her hand out. “I go by Mercy.”

“Hornet,” she said, shaking her hand. “I appreciate the save. If you want in on the Circle, you’re welcome.”

“I might just take you up on that,” Mercy said. “I’ve only had a couple team-ups before, with Ms Miracle, and we skipped the pre-team-up fight, but now you and I have had one, we really should deal with it.” She took a deep breath. “All the same, though, there’s something we should probably discuss before you fill me in on the Circle. It might affect things.”

“Sure,” Hornet said. She ran her fingers through waterlogged hair, trying her best to clear everything up. “What’s on your mind?”

Nothing else for it, Mercy reminded herself. “Just before I bring that topic up, I’d like to remind you we’ve just established I have you outmuscled. I’m not saying it’d be a foregone conclusion, just that you should be aware a fight isn’t the right call.”

Alexandra slowed to a halt, then stared at Mercy. “What exactly is this?” she asked.

“So it’s like this. I kind of need to know who else has you mind controlled. The easier we can do this discussion, the better, honestly.”

Hornet’s jaw dropped and she stared at the other heroine.