but Phelps joined us.
“George is talking to the last customer,” he said. “I’ve got the sales manager waiting upstairs. What’s this?”
“She,” I said, “is Galatea, and she’s with me.”
“Phelps,” Fisher said as the junior detective started to puff up. “I’ll be upstairs in a minute, after I show Astra and Galatea the security footage and they’ve had a look around.” He led the two of us to the other side of the floor. “Two in two weeks. Sorry about this, kid.”
I choked. I recognized the body hidden by the silver Mercedes.
“Donald Gerrold,” Fisher said. “You know him?”
And I wanted to kill him. This time I didn’t have to smell the blood—it was all over poor Don and the floor. At least someone had closed his eyes. I took a breath, swallowed, and decided I wasn’t about to contaminate the crime-scene.
“I met him today, Detective Fisher,” I said. As Hope. “He works for—worked for—Robert Early. What happened?” I managed to keep my voice even.
“That happened.” He pointed to bits of metal scattered around the floor and imbedded in showroom cars. “K-Strike?”
“Dude.”
The hero straightened up from his post by the door, stepping over the remains of whatever it was to join us. He wore a black half-helmet and a black and gray jumpsuit armored like a motorcycle racer’s. A short black swashbuckler’s cape, slung over one shoulder, made him look like a cyberpunk highwayman.
“K-Strike.” I smiled. I’d met the West Side Guardian at last year’s Metrocon blowout party, where he’d hit on Artemis in a charming but perfunctory way.
“Hey Astra,” he said. “Nasty business.”
“What happened?”
He looked at Fisher, and the detective nodded.
“I was riding home from a safety event two blocks from here when Dispatch called—said a metal-man had killed somebody and was shooting up the place. Bullets are no problem, so I came in without waiting for backup and found Robby the Robot here—” He waived around and I could see some of the bigger parts were arm or leg joints. “—firing away with a couple of built-in autorifles.”
He frowned. “Metal-dude wasn’t shooting to hit anybody, or even the cars, but I figured that could change. I could see it wasn’t some dude in armor, so I took it down.”
I looked around at the mess. “With what?”
He reached into a belt pocket and pulled out a couple of steel marbles. His power was a personal field that could absorb the kinetic energy of anything that touched it, making him bulletproof. He could also project kinetic energy into anything he touched; he could fire those marbles hard enough to punch holes in concrete, and take the eye out of a One-Eyed Jack with one, too—I’d seen him do it on the Metrocon best-of video.
“I took off its arms at the elbows so it couldn’t shoot anymore,” he said. “Then it just blew up. Lucky everyone was already under cover—the biggest bit left is its head over there.” He pointed to the caved-in robot head. It had camera-lens eyes and microphone ears.
Galatea looked at it, and then at the fragments of joints nearby.
“May I examine it?”
Fisher nodded. “Don’t touch anything yet.”
“I will not.” She knelt stiffly and placed a hand in front of the thing’s field of vision. “Detective Fisher,” she said. “The visual and audio sensors of this automaton are still active, and it is transmitting a signal.”
“It’s what? Wyatt, get me a trash can.”
My super-duper senses aren’t always the biggest help, but I heard the sharp thuds of unlatched steel doors and the timing set off alarms in my head.
“Fisher—”
The steel dragon came through the windows.
Chapter Seventeen
Superhero vs. supervillan fights are often short but seldom brutal. Lots of confrontations start and end with “You know who I am, do you really want to do this?” If the hero has a formidable reputation, often it’s enough. If it isn’t, neither side is usually trying to kill the other; villains who become cape-killers don’t prosper, and heroes who kill villains have to fill out all kinds of paperwork and appear in front of unsympathetic review boards. And then there’s the other kind of fight.
Astra, Notes From a Life.
* * *
“Dispatch!” I yelled. “Civilian evac!” Galatea froze, jerking, in the oddest attack of controlled epilepsy I’d ever seen, but people began disappearing in blurs of red as Rush arrived and started clearing the deck, staff and customers first. Fisher drew his gun before a sweeping claw threw him into the sports car behind him. He bent the wrong way, but before I could even