Homecoming

An uncharacteristically cool wind blew across the Louisiana swampland, fluttering through the shrouds of Spanish moss hanging from the gnarled boughs of Bald cypress trees. Dark brackish water shivered with ripples. The deep green fronds of marsh ferns swayed rhythmically at the touch of the moving air currents, and stroked the weathered planks of a large abandoned boat, creating an illusion in the fading light that the ship was being tossed about on a verdant leafy sea, rather than resting as a derelict husk permanently canted against a sandbar.

The vessel's exterior, pale chipped paint and unruly patches of brown fungus covering warped panels and a dilapidated paddlewheel, appeared utterly neglected, but that appearance was purposefully cultivated. Within the façade, and extending several yards beneath it, was the Riverboat headquarters of Bad Blood. A reinforced steel skeleton housed a modern operations center including laboratory space, sleeping quarters, meeting rooms and a computer infrastructure. From the outside, however, the Riverboat was unassuming, just another nineteenth-century artifact being slowly reclaimed by the flora of the bayou. It was located in a remote part of the swamp, but should a group of tourists sightseeing on an airboat or a local hunting coypu pass close by, the Riverboat would be nothing more to them than a part of the scenery.

The exception to this near-invisibility would be the fleeting moments in which a brightly-garbed superhero alighted on the half-collapsed wheelhouse atop the Riverboat, as Valence now did in a crackling green aura, his open biker jacket not fully concealing his gray and emerald uniform. He looked around at the swamp from his perch before stepping down, and saw nothing out of the ordinary.

A sudden rush of air behind him caused Valence to spin around, fists clenched and wreathed in electromagnetic energy.

"Whoa, easy, killer," Ember offered, holding up his hands peaceably as he soared up to the deck of the Riverboat. He landed and immediately doused the flames engulfing every surface of his body.

"Sorry," Valence shrugged. "Paranoid."

"Aren't we all," Ember shook his head.

"So you didn't find any game-changing explanations anywhere, either?" Valence asked.

"Not exactly," Ember admitted. "Pieces of the puzzle, maybe. But I doubt you want to hear me go over them twice, so maybe we should just wait for the meeting?"

"Fair enough," Valence conceded.

Ember bent down and lifted the camouflaged hatch which granted access to the Riverboat. "After you," he gestured, and followed a moment after Valence, allowing the hatch cover to slam shut behind him. A gust of wind rose up and bent several nearby cypress branches to scratch against the hatch, as if seeking an entrance of their own.

Valence and Ember entered the communications control room of the Riverboat and found the rest of the team already assembled. Pierce sat at the main computer console, with Hangfire, Karnival, More and Sojourn arrayed behind him. As Valence and Ember approached they could see that their teammates were staring at monitors which were uncharacteristically dark.

"What's going on?" Valence asked.

"Computer trouble," Karnival answered.

"Clotty acting up?" Ember assumed.

"Not exactly," Hangfire shook his head. "Clotty not doing much of anything."

"What, no response at all?" Ember demanded.

"None," Pierce confirmed, keying another command. The screens overhead showed no signs of activity.

"Hey, there was a storm around here a couple of days ago," Sojourn offered. "Could there maybe have been a power outage, or a surge, something that could have ... erased him?"

"Not likely. System has an independent, uninterruptible power supply," Pierce said.

"Here, let me drive," Ember said, putting his hand on the back of the chair where Pierce sat. The erstwhile Checkmate knight looked up as if to protest, but silently slid out of his seat and allowed Ember to take over. "I know there's a couple of backdoor commands my buddies put in for emergencies. Experimental AIs can be tempermental ..."

"To say the least," Valence added.

A few stark lines of glowing text appeared on the central monitor. "No hardware damage, no indication of massive power fluctations ... minor ones, though, which we might want to look into ..."

"Too minor to explain Clotty being out of commission, though, huh?" More asked.

"Right," Ember nodded. "What I'm accessing right now is a barebones operating system, purely for troubleshooting if the CLOTI gets corrupted or otherwise damaged. But it's telling me that there's no primary OS to troubleshoot. Nothing."

"We go away for a week and our computerized mascot gets deleted?" Hangfire inquired.

"I don't think that's it," Ember countered. "Even a thorough deletion of something that size would leave some evidence behind, which the backup OS should be able to see. And since it can't see anything ..."

"Clotty just left?" Karnival suggested. "Wanted to go check out a live show instead of a webcast or something?"

"Ha ha," Ember dryly retorted. "You might not be too far off, though. I think I remember being told about some kind of capability ..."

"Next time you get your WayneTech friends to give you volatile experimental technology, you really need to get some kind of documentation and not just a conversation you're going to forget most of," Sojourn rolled her eyes.

"I'll remember that, sweetcheeks," Ember rejoined. "Anyway, something about an ability to move between networked machines, back and forth, without leaving a trace. But the program is always supposed to come back to where it's programmed to reside."

"Which in Clotty's case is here," Valence said. "So if he went to another machine, for some reason he didn't come back."

"First thing to rule out would be a physical connection problem," Pierce stated, heading for the door. "Check the zeroplex cable."

Once Pierce had left the room, Ember swiveled his chair around to face the rest of Bad Blood. "The good news is that losing our base's foul-tempered artificial intelligence is not the worst thing we've had to deal with lately," he pronounced.

"Good news? Oh, nice," More grunted. "I get jokes."

"Did anybody manage to find any news at all?" Valence asked. "Good, bad, helpful, other ...?"

"There's nothing on the streets about the Manticores," Hangfire volunteered. "I got dead silence on that one, and call me a paranoid old galoot ..."

"Not gonna happen," Karnival shook his head. "You're the only one who would ever use the word ‘galoot'."

"... but the silence was deafening," Hangfire finished, ignoring Karnival. "Whoever's behind the Manticores had not only the material resources to get that project started but the overall resources to keep it from being talked about after the fact."

"I guess that should narrow it down," Valence said. "Not much, but it's a start. What else?"

"We absolutely need to keep an eye on Belle Reve for a while," Ember put in next. "Way I hear it, the reason why LocoForce didn't lend a hand to Minotaur, and the reason Minotaur went quietly to his punishment, is because they're setting something up, and they need Minotaur inside the prison."

"Setting something up, like a prison break?" More asked.

"Most likely," Ember agreed.

"But why bust him out of prison after not busting him out of police custody at the courthouse?" Sojourn asked.

"It fits their M.O.," Karnival suggested. "LocoForce is all about making grandiose statements, flaunting their powers and rubbing the world's faces in it. If they can liberate Minotaur from Belle Reve, they can put it on their collective resume and name their price for every mercenary job offer that comes rolling in."

"I told my contact to keep me posted," Ember added. "I think you're right, Karnival, they're going to want all eyes on them when they hit Belle Reve, so we should get some warning."

"All right, so we know a big player is behind the Manticores, and we know LocoForce is getting ready for a major operation," Valence said. "What about the spooky stuff – the Ohyn, the deformed experiments?"

"I couldn't find any common thread that covered them," Karnival admitted. "The misshapen freaks matched up with some of the known handiwork of Anton Arcane, called the Un-Men. But there's never been any connection between Arcane and vampires."

"I think that might be the point," Sojourn opined.

"How's that?"

"If there are ... forces ... out to get us, they might be trying to cover their tracks by making it look like someone else's work," Sojourn explained.

"They might," Karnival acknowledged. "That would certainly make me feel better about my research adding up to a whole lot of nothing."

"Do you have some reason to think that's definitely true?" Valence asked. "I have no problem believing Ember has some scumbag friends who can tell him what's on LocoForce's agenda ..."

"Technically," Ember interjected, "I have some very nice friends who happen to have scumbag friends of their own, et cetera."

" ... but where are you getting your information?" Valence pressed Sojourn.

Sojourn looked down, suddenly very intent on her cuticles. "I ... I'm not sure you'd believe me, even if I told you ..."

"Hey, give us a ..." More began to object when a dull thudding noise echoed up from the lower levels of the Riverboat. "What was that?" the strongman asked.

Karnival held up a silencing, skeletal hand, and the other members fell still, listening intently. A faint sound of wood splintering, high-pitched and dry, was followed by another heavy thud, and the floor buckled beneath their feet. Then the floor exploded as a gigantic tentacle burst outward, gnarled and grained like a tree branch, and coiled around Pierce's armored body.

More, Hangfire, Karnival and Sojourn dove to the corners of the room, while Ember and Valence immediately took flight. Valence strategically retreated to a higher vantage point near the ceiling, and unleashed a barrage of electromagnetic lightning. Ember plowed into the undulating plant-mass, snagging vine-like outgrowths in his fiery hands. Pierce continued to struggle to escape the serpentine snare.

Both the electric bolts and the flames left scorched black spots across the surface of the arboreal tentacle, but it seemed otherwise undamaged. It reared through the air and tore more of the flooring free, turning what had been a centralized hole into a long gash running almost the entire length of the room. Karnival attenuated his body to two dimensions and clung to the wall as the floorboards beneath him tumbled into the depths of the Riverboat.

"Still think we might not believe whatever you have to say, Sojourn?" More called out, as a smaller tendril lashed upward from the jagged lip of the break in the floor. This outgrowth was rootlike, hairy, dirty and pale, and quickly wrapped itself around the lower half of More's leg. More doubled over to grab the root and ripped it in two, spraying viscous black ichor from the severed ends.

"It was a ghost!" Sojourn answered. "A ghost showed up in my room and said that there were powers in New Orleans who could replicate the magic of almost anybody else – Anton Arcane, Felix Faust, Jinx, Tala ..."

"And, apparently, Blackbriar Thorn," Karnival added. "But who are these powers supposed to ..."

"Priorities, people!" Hangfire shouted, as he fired round after round of ammunition into the animated treelimb holding Pierce. "Shoot first, ask questions later!"

"My illusions don't really work on vegetable matter," Karnival apologized, as the gargantuan bough snapped like a whip towards Hangfire. Karnival skimmed quickly across the crumbling floor, grabbed Hangfire's shoulder with a three-dimensional hand, and yanked his teammate out of the way just before the fibrous tentacle smashed through the wall of the Riverboat.

Another section of the floor clattered down through the lower levels of the increasingly ruined headquarters, and Sojourn shifted to her immaterial spirit form, floating in mid-air. A low, inanimate groan sounded from the other side of the room, as the massive communications console began to slide along the sagging, broken floorboards and toward the dark aperture in the middle of the room.

"Whoa, now!" Valence insisted, as the communications console teetered precariously on the edge of the splintered hole, angling further and further downward. Reaching out magnetically, Valence enveloped the console in energy that arrested its movement. Slowly, the console rose through the air at Valence's command.

"Great, you saved a multi-million-dollar paperweight," Ember scoffed. "That thing's useless without Clotty."

"Useless for surfing the classified corners of the internet, maybe," Valence shrugged. "But can it chop? Slice? Dice? Julienne fries?"

The tree-limb tentacle was recoiling through the wall of the Riverboat, and Pierce was still circumscribed in its deathgrip. Valence became utterly still, focusing all of his concentration on the communications console, which began to unspool like an apple being peeled by an invisible knife. Lancinate strips of metal casing hovered beside trembling fragments of circuit boards and frayed lengths of cable. When the console had been fully magnetically butchered into hundreds of sharp-edged remnants, it rushed through the air like a swarm of junkpile insects.

Valence's eyes narrowed attentively as the shards of the console divebombed the plant-mass where it wrapped around Pierce's shoulders, waist, and knees. Each tiny metal fang gouged out only the smallest amount of pulpy matter, but in aggregate the attack created just enough breathing room for Pierce to finally slip free of the binding loops. Pierce tumbled away from the enormous bough.

A wave of green and yellow surged upward through the hole in the floor, a towering gelatinous mass of algae, moss, lichen and slime that pushed toward Valence. Two dendrons pulsed outward from the mass, one brandishing the rot-stained skull of a black bear, the other a similarly decomposed alligator skull. Strands of bracken like marionette strings pulled open the jaws of the animal skulls, then caused them to clamp down, each snapping shut around one of Valence's wrists. Valence stiffened in pain and tried to pull away, but found himself held fast.

Pierce, however, had recovered and braced himself against the collapsing wall. He aimed both gauntlets toward Valence and fired two sonic blasts, one for each of the bone-white heads. The skulls blew apart, accompanied by wet splatters of yellow-green muck.

More plant-mass feelers were invading the Riverboat, trunks of knotty pine and broad sporophytes of ferns and dusky roots and impossibly tall whiplike grasses, alternately seeking to entangle or bludgeon the members of Bad Blood. The enormous central tree appendage swept from side to side, nearly knocking Ember out of the air before suddenly reversing and bashing More into the wall.

Sojourn reverted to flesh and blood so that her teammates could once again hear her voice. "I can see the magic flowing through these plants," she informed them, "and it's all coming up from the Earth. We just have to tear them out to cut them off!"

"That's all well and good, darlin'," Hangfire retorted, slashing with a hunting knife at a grasping tree branch. "But these things are huge, More can't get the leverage, and Valence can't use magnetism on wood."

"He can fly," Pierce pointed out, ducking just out of reach of a noose-like twist of thick fronds. "Valence, Ember, grab on and fly straight up."

Valence and Ember flew in close to the giant central shoot and found handholds on its craggy, bark-covered surface. Each one began to rise skyward, arms taut against the swaying bole, but their progress was soon halted by the sheer weight of the plant-mass. The ancillary limbs tried to brush the two heroes away, scratching at their backs with dagger-like thorns, tugging at their legs with leafy ropes.

Pierce launched wave after wave of sonic blasts at the plant-mass, trying to clear enough working room for Ember and Valence to prevail. More leapt onto the plant-mass like a hypertrophied Jack climbing a malevolent beanstalk, and pounded on the fibrous husk with his fists. Hangfire dropped several concussion grenades down the hole in the floor, hoping to disturb enough of the sandy mud below to loosen the plant-mass's grip on the Earth. The detonations echoed loudly through the ravaged Riverboat and the plant-mass shook with something that might have been suffering or fury, but Valence and Ember were still unable to gain even another inch of altitude.

"Pull!" Valence exhorted.

"Am ... pulling ...!" Ember responded through clenched teeth. His aura of flames crackled and popped loudly, consuming some of the smallest leaves and twigs. "Too ... heavy ..."

The Riverboat moaned funereally as its collapse became more inevitable, but the sound was covered by the reports of Pierce's and Hangfire's weapons. Then another noise rose through the general din of the battle, the keening of mechanical jets steadily rising as the source approached, closer and closer. An object fell into the Riverboat like a missile, striking the plant-mass just between Ember and Valence, and grabbed onto the central trunk as well.

At rest, the object could be seen for what it was: a man. He was dressed in a white shirt and brown slacks; a thin necktie draped over his left shoulder. A fedora sat atop his head, a tobacco pipe was clenched between his teeth, and loafers with steady jets of rocket-fire expelling from the heels were on his feet. The rocket jets burned a hot bluish-white as the new arrival strained to lift the plant-mass higher.

Valence and Ember were momentarily taken aback by the pipe-smoking man’s arrival, but quickly recovered and resumed their efforts. The plant-mass flailed wildly, but inexorably began to rise as Ember, Valence and the rocket-propelled man hauled it from the substratum. The plant-mass resisted, until suddenly the flying trio jerked upwards and the roots were completely separated from the swamp below, while the uppermost limbs smashed through the top decks of the Riverboat like an arboreal battering ram. Held aloft above the gutted Riverboat, the plant-mass quickly withered, turning the grayish color of long-dead flesh and shriveling to a miniscule fraction of its former size.

As if it could finally relax with the invasion thwarted, the Riverboat imploded with a tremendous crash. Sojourn's spirit form and Karnival's flattened body allowed them to escape harm, while Hangfire, Pierce and More were forced to jump clear, splashing into the dark water surrounding the sandbar.

The team regrouped atop the wreckage of the Riverboat, a seven-person half-circle facing the eighth, the stranger among them. He appeared middle-aged and paternal, almost prototypically so. His clothing, although seeming to have been made recently, was dated, the shirt and tie and pants cut in a fashion that was several decades behind the times. He regarded the members of Bad Blood quietly, his pipe still tucked neatly into the corner of his lips.

Valence broke the silence by stepping forward and extending a hand to the man. "I don't know who you are, friend, but thanks."

The man shook Valence's hand, but after one pump Valence froze, his eyes narrowing. "You're ... you're a robot," Valence said.

The metal man inclined his fedora-topped head.

"Can you speak?" Valence asked.

"Of course I can speak," the robot said in a familiar digitized growl. "I've just been trying to figure out exactly how to express my utter shock that you knocked down the whole damn base while I was away."

"Okay, found Clotty, check that off the list," Karnival said.

TO BE CONTINUED ...

MESSAGES WRITTEN IN BLOOD ...

I'm not going to beg ... even though part of me really, really wants to ... Send e-mail correspondence to badblood51@hotmail.com

NEXT ISSUE: The Riverboat is ruined, but Clotty is back! There's never a dull moment in the Big Easy, with more answers discovered, more questions raised, and more action! Be here!