Alexandra was kneeling before her Mistress, which was just the way both of them liked it. Her head was bowed, so that she didn’t have to make eye contact - it could be taxing sometimes - but this had led to her instead looking fixedly at Mistress’ shoes, and while Mistress digested her report, she had some peaceful time with which to contemplate them and imagine kneeling astride them, grinding herself against them, showing Mistress just how needy and obedient she was whenever her Mistress wanted to flex her power.

“Well,” Mistress said at length, “That complicates things.”

“Two new factors,” the Hooded Hawk chimed in. Alexandra was very proud that her daughter in law had become her Mistress’ de facto tactical advisor; there was certainly nothing wrong with the instincts of the rest of the super-harem, but as a veteran of fighting superhumans with near-human capabilities, Hawk had sharpened her powers of observation and deduction more than the rest. It seemed to be common among people like that. “This android, and the Ophidian Circle.”

“Yes,” Mistress agreed. “Analysis?”

“The android is primed to be suspicious,” Hawk said. “We also can’t disprove the key part of her suspicions.”

Alexandra nodded to herself. If you had a chip in your spine monitoring and manipulating your mind, it wasn’t going to be easy to prove you didn’t. But having the chip removed… She shuddered at the thought that once it was removed she might have a different enough point of view to try and prevent it from being re-added.

“If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t consider them a problem,” Hawk continued. “They’re a heroine. We’re on the same ethical line.”

Something in Alexandra made her glance up to Mistress at that. She regularly found herself doubting the morals of her Mistress, but had never caught her doing anything untoward. The expression Mistress wore didn’t quite align with the good news this offered.

“She won’t think so,” Mistress pointed out. And that was certainly true.

Hooded Hawk nodded. “No, Mistress. We need to concern ourselves with that. But the Circle operating here is a problem. They will not stop at trying to indoctrinate Hornet. And they historically have targeted significant community members, politicians and business leaders.”

“Oh.” The tone of Mistress’ voice had completely changed and Alexandra looked up again to see concern on her face. “They might target me?”

“I’m afraid so, Mistress.”

“I didn’t think about that,” she said quietly, and shuddered.

Alexandra glanced across to Hawk, who met her gaze with her professional deadpan. Even in the past few months, however, Alexandra had begun to read Hawk’s eyes, and she could see puzzlement in them that echoed her own.

Being mentally controlled had been such a good thing for them both, it was hard for them to really understand that people not under mental control considered it a bad thing.

“We need to eliminate them, Mistress,” Hawk said. “One path suggests itself.”

“Go on.”

“Myself or Milo should act as liaison with the android. We can try to frame the Circle as the ones manipulating you and use any information she has to offer to co-ordinate strikes to shut the Circle down. She seems to have some experience with them, after all. She has no reason to suspect us of implants, and she will want to see if we are controlling Hornet.”

Alexandra caught her breath. The hero in her still hated the idea that someone else might be sacrificing themselves for her - that was what she did, she had the resilience to survive doing it - but it made clear, logical sense. Now it had been pointed out it was the obvious thing to do, even if it hadn’t been before. After her breath, she nodded.

“Good,” Mistress said. “And if you see an opportunity to bring her to our side, do it.”

“Of course, Mistress,” Hawk answered. “But I do not imagine we will be able to.”

“What? Why not?”

“The Vulcan devices were designed for humans and human-augments. The android is an android.”

The sentence hung in the air for a moment. Easy to imagine that Mistress could feel insulted by the obviousness of the explanation she’d overlooked. It happened, often, among the powerful.

Tracy Hathor laughed abruptly. “Well, I’m dumb.”

“No, Mistress!” Both of them had spoken at almost the same time, eager to deny her criticism, eager to obey their programming.

But she waved a hand dismissively. “No, I am. But that’s okay. The whole point of being a CEO is you get to have the minds you need around you.” And, of course, in her case she also got total control over those minds, though she didn’t bother to point that out.

She stood up and smiled. “Hornet, gather the others and brief them. Give them any information you can on the Circle. Hawk, you know your duty.”

“Yes, Mistress,” they agreed before leaving.

*

The city was a tech-head’s dream, viewed from a superhuman perspective. You didn’t need mad scientists to create unpredictable technology uses when you had techbro capitalists. Mercy was pretty sure there were a dozen or more forms of surveillance running through the city, each being used actively to train some AI system or other.

That wasn’t the only reason that, at the precise moment Tracy Hathor was issuing orders to her docile superslaves, Mercy wasn’t in the city, but it was one of them. The other had come right out of older memories.

She dropped from the air to land just outside Sky Londa, right on the edge of the woodlands nearby. It was a tiny little community, but it was enough, she’d been told over a decade before, to camouflage unusual traffic passing through on the roads.

Vulcan had been fond of 4x4 offroaders at the time - perhaps he still was - and, just as importantly, he’d been fond of buying up patches of undeveloped land whenever they came on the market for below a given price. Usually these patches had no permission for development in any case, but that didn’t bother him. Nobody would see what was built there unless he showed it to them anyway.

She started walking into the trees. If memory served, aerial security was tighter than if you proceeded on foot.

It had been a long time, and woodland was always changing. Walk in the woods behind your home every day and you’ll absorb those changes without even noticing them, but compare photos taken from the same spot ten years apart and they will look notably different. Vivian was looking for a cluster of three trees that wouldn’t have changed over that time, because they were entirely artificial.

The access hatch to one of Vulcan’s lairs was buried between the three, and unlocked via a careful manipulation of one of the tree’s branches.

Even having been shown what to look for at the time, it took her more than an hour before she spotted the hidden entrance. She stepped up close to the leaning tree, took hold of a branch protruding from a particularly gnarled piece of knotwood, and twisted it slowly counter-clockwise.

Castor had been a technological genius when he wanted to be. The mechanism certainly wouldn’t have been used since he was locked up, possibly not for even longer. But the only indication that the hatch had unlocked when it did was the faint hiss of air escaping as the seal broke.

Mercy counted to five in her head. Just before she got there, a section of ground by her feet fell away smoothly, revealing a cylindrical descent, lined with soft blue lights, with an access ladder welded in place.

As she climbed down the ladder she wondered, as she always did, whether he’d built these lairs himself or whether there was a construction company out there somewhere who’d put together all these crazy hidden projects, installing the technology he’d designed.

If there was, what on earth did they think they’d been building? Had they pieced it together when Castor was finally exposed?

Once her feet touched the ground below the ladder, the hatch sealed itself. Unless someone had been following the metallic glints reflected off her bodysuit through the woods, they would have no idea there was anything to find.

The space below was expansive, and the ceiling was fairly tall; but then it would have to be if Vulcan ever wore his power suit down there. He’d occasionally sported versions of it that must have been a good foot and a half taller than the person inside. It was buried deeply enough that the generator wouldn’t be picked up on overhead thermal scans, which also meant buried deeply enough that disruption to tree roots were minimal.

She remembered vividly how excited Castor had been, explaining that to Macabre. “Never took you for an eco freak,” she’d said to him, and his eyes had gleamed as he said “Disrupt the roots, and you paint a target on the ground for anyone to see from the air.”

He’d always wanted to show that he thought things through more deeply, and in more detail, than anyone else in the game. Looking back on it having met more techbros, as well as more balanced nerds, she now thought that this show might also have been to hide just how much joy he’d taken in the designs themselves.

The lab was still powering back up, which told Vivian it had been in deep hibernation state when she opened it. She didn’t know how long it would need to go unvisited in order to go into deep hibernation, but it most likely hadn’t been active for far longer.

Probably Castor had felt no need to use it for some while before his arrest, but then he’d already had over a dozen lairs when they worked together. He struck her as a compulsive; she had no doubt that number was higher today, and this was probably one of the furthest out ones. It was probably just there for emergencies and out of habit.

In front of the main computer console was a giant, reinforced and padded armchair, something that he could have settled into in or out of his powersuit. Vivian took some satisfaction in dropping into it in his place, swivelling it from one side to the next as she waited for the big screen to come to life. “This is a proper villain chair,” she said approvingly. As Macabre she’d spent too much time travelling, half-improvised too many of her plans. She’d never had a lair of her own. Now she was beginning to feel she’d missed out, however much he must have spent on this.

Ah, well. Some opportunities just came too late in life.

The emergency lighting went off a half-second after the main lights cut in, and the big screen loaded up at the same time. It might have been coincidence, but part of her was sure Castor had fine-tuned the timing on this sequence until it was exactly how he wanted.

After briefly displaying the status of every system in the lair, it opened up to a text prompt with a microphone icon next to it, the rest of the screen a featureless grey.

The microphone was reassuring. She didn’t sound like Vulcan, so she didn’t want to speak, but anything you could talk into could probably process natural language requests. She wouldn’t have to play guess-the-command-structure.

She typed in, Status report on most recent activity at location. Then she hit Enter and the text prompt disappeared, replacing with a series of dots appearing in a line, then the line disappearing only for the sequence to begin again. The query was being processed.

She waited patiently. After about a minute, the classic DNA double-helix appeared, filling one side of the screen. The rest of the screen filled up with scientific detail. None of it meant anything to Vivian, but the moment she’d seen it was genetic she hadn’t expected it to.

Fortunately, it turned out that heroes weren’t actually on their own when it came to solving mysteries. She triggered the recorder in her helmet to take several still images, then backed out of the screen.

This time she typed in, Active control device status.

Again the screen updated to a row of dots lighting up before disappearing and repeating. Vivian waited patiently.

The screen lit up with a succinct report:

Control Devices On Standby: 18

Control Devices Charging: 1

Control Devices Actively Operating: 0

Control Devices Unaccounted For: 6

Control Units Active: 53

Control Units Primed: 2

Control Units Dormant: 45

This was more information than she’d asked for, which was either the supercomputer’s AI trying to be helpful or just the relevant data page Vulcan had liked to see.

So, twenty-five control devices, and a total of one hundred control units. Units must be the control implant systems Vulcan had designed. She wondered if dormant meant unused, inactive, or whether if someone was asleep the control unit was considered dormant. If it was the last option, most of them were sleeping during the day, so probably not.

The control devices would be the remote controls. She’d guessed right with the terminology, but there was, after all, no way there were more remote controls than there were things to be controlled by them.

None were being used - well, ‘operated’ - but control units were active. Presumably a device only registered as actively operated when it was being used to assert authority or give commands. One was charging. Most likely that was the one that was being used against Hornet. But the number of other devices concerned her.

She’d seen the remote control Vulcan used, just once. That must be a device, but it seemed strange for it to be a handheld device meant for a human hand, when he spent so much time in his powersuit. Unless, that was, he also built the device into his suits.

Vivian sat up. Castor had been taken wearing a suit, which had been destroyed. His friend had stolen a second suit, which had been destroyed in turn. Could those now be devices ‘unaccounted for’ following their destruction?

Vulcan suits weren’t broken very often. But maybe these remote controls were more vulnerable. If two suits and four remotes had been destroyed, and that was the six unaccounted for control devices, that might explain it. And if four remotes had been broken, that might explain why he’d made so many.

Except…

Except there was another reason he might have built far more than needed, wasn’t there? Castor loved to build redundancy into his systems. She was sitting in a textbook example of that.

What if there was a control device to hand in every lair? Just in case he showed up at one, had to dump the suit, and needed to issue orders?

It was all too likely, and it sent a shiver down her spine. She stood up and headed further into the lair. Perhaps if she took inventory she’d find one, and she could confirm her suspicions.

As she stepped up to the next door and automated systems slid it open efficiently and almost soundlessly, just far enough in advance of her footsteps to be fully open as she reached it, her mind was still on the question of the control units.

Fifty-three people with control units in place, if she understood that right. Which was a horrifying number of superhumans to bring to bear on anything. Depending on their identities, it might be an unstoppable group.

It occurred to Vivian that this carried a proof of its own; they couldn’t all be superhumans. Castor would have taken a real glee in unleashing a crowd of mind controlled heroes and heroines on their friends and enemies. The kind of glee he wouldn’t be able to resist. He’d risk his own plans to enjoy that kind of payoff.

So, one of them was Hornet. That was a given. Chipping other supers must have stayed a tough challenge. Maybe a handful of others might be supers, but the majority of them must have been chipped not for their raw physical power but for something else.

Businessmen were an obvious guess. Politicians (she’d have said local politicians, but Hypercorp was proudly global and Castor had never been one to do things small) were too. Possibly a celebrity or two if she assumed his control unit budget had an allowance for being petty, and she could believe it. Law enforcement agents if he could get access to them. Even security operatives, if they happened to be protecting an area he wanted access to.

Identifying them could be a problem.

She looked around what was obviously the workshop for this lair. This section hadn’t been added when she’d last been there; she could picture Vulcan drilling it out himself, excavating it, scattering the soil in the forest above or dumping it into the Sound on moonless nights, before building a strong shell in, lining it with power cables, access points and lights, bringing in all the tools he needed over time.

She sighed. It wasn’t like she couldn’t get a secret base of her own; she just didn’t work this way. Her work was out on the streets or at the crime scenes, which she supposed this should probably count as.

It was well organised, though. Everything was nicely laid out. Castor had even labelled the various drawers and containers - probably worried that if he didn’t use this place often enough he wouldn’t be able to find what he needed when he did.

She opened the small drawer labelled Command Chip Control.

It was empty.

She started at the space where the slim control rod, or whatever the modernised version looked like, should be for quite a while. The box had a small recess and clip point at the base; any control device placed in there would automatically be clipped in place to charge. Presumably they went on standby when they were fully charged, or the numbers didn’t fit.

This was it. This was the location where the control had been stolen from.

Except…

She made another circuit of the lair, looking carefully around, but she already knew she wasn’t going to find one. They were too big for her not to have noticed - not when Castor only hid the entrance to his lairs.

There was nowhere here he could have been storing Hornet.

Twenty-five control devices total. Some were probably suits. How many suits had Vulcan had?

Vivian had no idea, but she decided to guess at five and follow the logic through. If five control devices had been suits, that left twenty which weren’t.

Would that mean one control device per lair? Twenty lairs?

That seemed reasonable. Hornet would have been stored in one of them, probably one in the city itself.

The control device here was missing, but Hornet had been kept somewhere else.

So at least two of those ‘unaccounted for’ devices were out there in the wider world, the one from here and the one from wherever Hornet had been held.

Beneath her mask she frowned.

*

Hundreds of billions of dollars were made annually in the city of San Francisco. There were cities which brought in more money, but not many, and it was due in no small part to a city council which supported high-tech businesses, often bending over backwards to carve out exceptions to local ordinances or changes to the law which would benefit them.

HyperCorp had been one of the biggest beneficiaries of this behaviour for some years now - really only the Big Data crowd had done better by municipal policy - and Tracy Hathor had become determined that this wouldn’t change under her watch.

At first she had feared this would happen automatically. HyperCorp had been thought to be good to the city but, once Castor’s other actions were known to be at the hands of the HyperCorp visionary, it was hard to argue that they hadn’t been a net negative, if only by helping to fund Castor for so long.

And while he’d built up a library of personal connections, those were hardly likely to side with her.

The same thing had rescued her leadership of the company and her chance to connect to the local politicians; the self-destruction of one of her detractors by stealing a Vulcan suit and getting caught in it during his failed bid for power.

Tracy could certainly understand his desire to build up more power, but he’d made a damn fool of himself and the only positive was that now, everyone wanted to be publicly on her side, as she’d been his target and was proved good.

This, in and of itself, she found ironic. Anyone who’d reached her position in business had to have a flexible attitude to ethics, but in recent months she’d found herself simply trying not to think about it.

Her driver pulled up outside Boulevard and she emerged from the back seat, sauntering inside. No paparazzi, she noted with quiet approval; some councillors saw it as an important part of their role to appear in the press as often as possible rubbing shoulders with big names.

It was a sign that her hostess thought more carefully about things. Long-term, Tracy felt, those were the relationships most worth cultivating.

Councillor Firman rose to her feet as Tracy approached, all smiles, holding out her hand. Tracy shook it. “Good to meet you again, Councillor,” she said. Firman was thirty-two, according to the dossier she’d had Harrier put together, five years younger than Tracy herself. Probably she wouldn’t yet have arrived in her position if not for family wealth, but that had fast-tracked her.

That didn’t make her worthless, even if it meant she had less personal power than most of the others. In Tracy’s eyes, it made Firman an investment.

Dinner was exquisite, as it always was at Boulevard. They kept their conversation consciously free from anything to do with either person’s work, and in truth, they didn’t talk about much; neither of them had kept room in their life for hobbies for years now. They spoke of music with passing familiarity, and about television trends vaguely enough that anyone else would have known neither of them had seen the shows.

Eventually, the moment Hathor was waiting for arrived; Councillor Firman excused herself politely and stepped away from the table, making her way toward the restroom. Tracy counted to ten in her head, slowly, and then got up and went to follow, clutching her purse tightly.

Gillian Firman gave her a soft smile as she slipped in through the door, then turned back to the mirror. “We can take a breather much more easily doing this in turns if there are only two of us, you know,” she said lightly.

“If that was my intent,” Tracy answered, trying to match her tone for levity, “then that’s exactly the strategy I’d have gone with.”

“Oh?” She could see the confusion - and the caution - in the reflection of Firman’s eyes. But that was fine.

The Councillor was wearing her hair gathered up into a bun. It wouldn’t have made a difference if she’d had her hair down, but it certainly made it easier that she had it up.

Stepping up close behind her, Tracy released her purse, letting it hang from the loop around her wrist, and raised her other hand holding the cylinder she’d taken from that purse. She pushed the tapered end of the injector against the back of Councillor Firman’s neck and thumbed the switch on the other end.

There was an audible whunk and Gillian let out a startled yelp, wheeling around to stare at Tracy in astonishment. “What the fu-

“Silence.”

Gillian Firman felt the rest of the sentence die in her throat. Standing there for a moment gawping like a fish out of water, she recovered her composure swiftly enough to close her mouth. Something prickled across her scalp as she did, a pleasing tingle.

“I don’t mean to interrupt - what am I saying, obviously I enjoyed that - but I do know what you were going to ask. And the answer is, I have no right, but I have a need. So I have elected to do this anyway, knowing you will forgive me.

“So. You wanted a meeting with me so you could see if I could be useful to your career. You knew I would need some incentive to support you. I have arranged that incentive, and here we are. And now you can’t speak. Can you?”

Rather than try, she shook her head. That same pleasing tingle came back, and it might not have been her imagination that it felt better than the first time.

“You’re an intelligent woman, Councillor Firman.”

As Gillian’s thighs squeezed together and a long, blissful shiver ran up her spine from her crotch to her self, she didn’t feel particularly sharp-witted, but had to admit that whatever she felt she was enjoying.

“I’m sure you’ve already worked out that this is out of your hands. And you’ve probably noticed that I’m not hesitating in my speech. Therefore I clearly already know what I’m saying, and therefore I have probably done this before. Several times.

“The odds of you finding some way to outwit the process are, therefore, quite low. Do smile, please.”

Gillian’s lips parted in a dazed smile.

“Mmm. Much better. Let your hair down and stand up straight.”

She reached up, fingers shaking, and removed the hairpins, letting her hair down and covering whatever mark had been left by the injection, as she stood up straight.

Hathor reached under her arms from behind her and started to grope her tits. A hiss of escaped breath left her lips, the loudest protest she could manage. “Oh, relax and enjoy it,” she was told, just before a particularly possessive squeeze.

She relaxed into the experienced hands. The smile on her lips reached her eyes as she began to enjoy it.

“That’s better. I may take this further sometime, if I have a quiet evening. You’ll make time for me, after all.”

Gillian could still say nothing.

“You’ll make time when I - or HyperCorp - call on you, won’t you, Councillor?” Hathor asked. Gillian nodded, meeting her eyes in the mirror. The smile below them was entirely the result of instruction, but the pleasure that pulsed up her spine with every instruction meant that she could make out a spark of enjoyment in the reflection of her eyes.

That enjoyment would haunt her.

“Good.” Abruptly, the hands left her body. “That’s all for now. It’s just important that you understand your situation. Now, that being the case,” Hathor said briskly, “let’s enjoy dessert together. And you can see how much pleasure you can bring me with the tip of your foot, under the tablecloth.” Her eyes twinkled with amusement. “You may speak, but you may not scream or accuse. Am I understood?”

“Yes, ma’am.”