It hadn't even been three days, but it felt like my life had changed completely.
I had an apartment now — a small one, in the Boardwalk area of the Docks, registered to one of the thicket of corporations that had sprung up over the last few days, each one owning the next or paying it a licensing fee or an intellectual property fee or something else entirely. There were a lot of papers to sign.
I thought I would be paying myself rent starting May first, but it was hard to be sure.
Technically, the duplex was still owned by the bank — title wouldn't transfer until some time next week, and even that was moving fast. I'd asked Quinn about how that worked, and why the bank wasn't worried about the contractors going through it even now, adding steel security doors, and window bars, and lights, and plenty of terraria. He'd just smiled and said that the trick was knowing what everyone wanted, and being trusted to deliver it when needed. And then followed up with a ten minute discussion of how different escrow structures and forms of property interests interacted that I probably could have done without.
The point about trust was interesting, though. I'd have to think about it more later.
Either way, when they were done, I'd have a newly renovated apartment, pretty secure by normal standards, with a couple of boltholes and multiple escape routes. A determined cape would still go right through it, but it might slow them down a step… and that might be enough.
I might be a little paranoid about the security of any given place, but that was understandable, given recent events. And I could see myself getting to like living there, eventually — it would be a comfortable space: one side of the duplex on which to live, and another on which to work.
When I wasn't working on my farm.
There was an actual, honest-to-goodness, farm out west, past Captain's Hill.
Maybe someone would have put houses on it eventually, but it was the property to which the very Captain Brockton who'd founded the city had retired. Too historic to redevelop; not historic enough to have to have its own endowment or any tourism income. Too small to be a working farm; too large to be someone's country estate… but apparently just right to be an agricultural research facility.
With some kind of historic conservation easement, and who knew what other legal issues, involved. I couldn't follow the dizzying array of exceptions, subsidies, and tax breaks that were apparently available, but I did get the sense that Quinn was enjoying working on a different sort of problem than usual.
Some of the legal things were clear enough — importation of foreign insects was, generally, illegal. Also, an authorized parahuman PRT vendor could pretty much bypass those restrictions. I guess, compared to Tinkers, my requirements were considerably more modest. Anyway, Quinn had spent most of Friday down at their headquarters talking to them about spider-silk, and pricing.
There'd be room for more of that work next week, once I could get started on the farm. Quinn was already ordering bees shipped up there — you could get pounds of bees for almost nothing! Heck, I could sell queens back to the suppliers and cover the cost in about three weeks, though there were bigger plans in the works there.
And apparently, having one of the corporations I owned employ me as farm labor meant that I could get a driver's license, which was why I had a little Vespa scooter now. It definitely beat the bus on convenience!
All of which explained why getting down to where the Downtown met the Docks took me eight minutes, instead of forty-five-to-fifty and a bus transfer. I'd settled into an overly fancy café — the kind where the coffee came in varieties with French or Italian names, instead of 'black' or 'cream and sugar are on the table' — for a late breakfast with a croque madame, some hot chocolate, my notebook, and a paper.
The paper had some useful news: there'd been a big fight last night between the Protectorate and E88, with a dozen capes in all joining in at one time or another. It was being reported as a Protectorate victory.
I frowned.
They'd captured Alabaster.
He wasn't anything special, as capes went, but the fact that the heavily outnumbered Protectorate force had taken him and kept him did say something real about how the fight had gone. Something real enough that E88 might well try and break him out to maintain their reputation... if they could.
There had been reports of infighting among E88 over the last few days, following the death of Kaiser. I'd been too busy with Quinn over the last few days, trying to set up the foundations of my independent (and, so far, legitimate!) life to follow up… but now I had time.
Which was while I was reading about the other crime news (dominated by missing person reports, mostly missing due to Bakuda, ranging from a heartbreakingly young girl in middle-school through a father of three to the Bay's lone centenarian), my attention was also focused on the Heritage Insurance tower just three blocks away.
And beneath that tower there was something that looked very like an Endbringer shelter from the outside… except for the amount of activity. And the fact that it wasn't on the evacuation map of the area. It wasn't, strictly speaking, impossible to keep insects out of a man-made structure, and a buttoned-up shelter was about as close as one could get to making that practical. But there were people coming in and going out, and where they went insects followed.
Bit by bit, I was building up a picture of a military base, with armories and barracks, supply warehouses and cafeterias, infirmaries and brigs, all staffed with hard-eyed men and women in camo and harnesses. At that, the facility had space for four times as many people, easy.
Dense enough concentrations of bugs to see what was going on were rare, and I wasn't eager to do anything out of the ordinary until I understood what Coil could do. If he were a Thinker, he might be able to deduce my presence from observing the directed movement of a single insect, let alone a swarm. And if he were a Tinker instead… the only limitations on how dangerous a Tinker could get were lack of resources, lack of imagination, and lack of focus.
Dragon was, as with pretty much everything else concerning Tinkers, the paradigmatic example.
She had a budget speculated to be the size of some small countries'. And with that budget, she built and kept the Birdcage: a prison which held the most dangerous capes. I had no idea how many capes she was holding, but it was a lot. One Tinker versus an army of extremely powerful parahumans, each specifically selected for strength and viciousness. With her as Warden, there'd never been a breakout.
And since that didn't even qualify as a full time job for her, she moonlighted as one of the most powerful heroes in the world.
Bakuda had been, as Tinkers went, barely mid-list — and she had a higher kill-count than any cape in the Bay with the possible exception of Lung. She would have only gotten more dangerous with time: whatever the 'big one' that she'd been working on when I killed her was, it probably would have been a real threat. Something that boiled the seas, or stopped time… or maybe just a nuclear bomb. Anything her imagination, her focus, and her resources permitted, a Tinker could accomplish.
Anything at all.
Oh, Tinkers had specializations — but that mostly affected how they did what they did. Probably made some things easier, others harder, but from a distance? Even Leet could pull completely new sets of tricks out of nowhere in time for his weekly show, while the rest of us capes had to work with whatever one trick we'd gotten.
Tinkers.
Maybe he wasn't one. Coil had money enough to be buying his laser guns, and a Tinker base might be expected to have more Tinkertech lying around. Not that I'd necessarily recognize it when I saw it, not that I was seeing everything. Put simply, I did not feel like taking a chance here until I understood what I was dealing with.
This guy had a no-fooling underground base, like a Bond villain of some kind, and a force of trained mercenaries armed with guns. And also lasers. Bakuda, who'd killed so many, had been working out of a converted apartment maintenance office.
So, I was pretty sure he had all the resources any Tinker could ask for.
I was similarly confident that he had pretty good focus — no one gets to be a crimelord accidentally. And I didn't really feel like risking a fight against the chance that he wasn't imaginative enough to have taken precautions against being (literally!) bugged.
At the very least, I was pretty sure that Lung had given me Coil's location in the hope I'd get killed, and he might well have warned Coil that I would be paying a visit.
That was nothing less than what I'd done to him with Kaiser, after all.
There were some anomalies: places that just didn't fit into the otherwise symmetrical military base layout. An area sealed behind vault doors thicker than the ones at the entrance. Thicker than what they used for Endbringer shelters. Maybe I could get through by forming a full swarm and trying to get through the mesh in the vent system — maybe not. Not something to try today, but definitely something to worry about.
Worse, the guards posted on that door faced in as well as out.
It looked like a prison built for Lung… but Lung was, as far as I knew, free. And I didn't think whatever it was would be guarded this way if it were empty. Besides — there were noises coming from the other side. Not the reassuring kind, either.
There was also an area that looked more like two dozen small apartments — less than half occupied, but clearly not intended for the troops. Officers? Guests? Specialists?
Capes?
Another fortified area, this one with what looked like two escape tunnels from it, was probably Coil's office. It had an anteroom, what had to be an office with a massive desk, a bathroom… and, in a side room on a cot, a young girl sleeping.
Too young.
I couldn't think of a lot of good reasons for a gang boss to keep someone younger than I was on a cot next to where he worked. She was clothed, and periodically someone came by — from the movements, a doctor or nurse, giving her medical care and sometimes pills — so maybe it wasn't what it seemed. From her mutterings, she wasn't feeling well at all — except right after she got some of her 'candy'.
Not a good sign.
I didn't get much out of Coil himself — he sat at his desk and typed, looking at a screen. I didn't have the density of bugs to see what he was doing, didn't want to risk gathering more than were there naturally, and those were so few and so far away that even the hearing was sometimes patchy. Occasionally he spoke, over a phone or in person, with his subordinates. His conversations were brief, businesslike. He spoke in a frustratingly familiar manner, like he'd stepped out of a military movie I half-remembered. Most of it wouldn't make sense without more context: he was moving forces, preparing for something, checking on status of projects — all vital intelligence, if I had any idea which force was which, what goals he had, or what projects he was working on.
Taking notes would help build that picture up.
Eventually.
The discussion about the setup of 'another secondary base' didn't really need further context to disturb, though, particularly since the street referenced wasn't in his territory.
Coil's reputation in the Bay was that of a minor crimelord, barely hanging on in the face of the ABB and E88. This massive underground fortress didn't look like it belonged to someone who was content with that role. It didn't even look like a gang base at all — it looked military. And it couldn't have come cheaply or quickly.
Either Kaiser and Lung were wasting money by the truckload, or Coil's turf wasn't his sole source of revenue.
Not even his primary source of revenue.
And if Coil had these resources, this power, already… why was he bothering with pretending to run a street gang? It wasn't unheard of for people to lowball their abilities — Lung, for instance, had the power to be doing much grander things than taking a C-list California gang's name and turning it into his own banner.
It was still… odd.
Maybe Coil liked being underestimated, but no one built a giant underground death-fortress without an ego that required a giant underground death fortress for itself. And that kind of ambition, or possibly insecurity, didn't fit with a desire to enjoy the little things in one's street-gang life, not the way Lung's La-Z-Boy with automatic massager did.
More mysteries.
Well, if Lung was setting a trap for me, then I'd go slow. Find out what Coil's power, if any, was. Find out what he wanted, and how he planned to get it. Find out who he was keeping prisoner, and how to set them free. If I were willing to be ruthless, it wouldn't be hard to find all the entrances and exits, take time, and swarm the whole complex under. Right now.
Three things stopped me.
First, killing was… something I wasn't really at peace with. Bakuda was dead, by my hand. Arguably, I had a share in the deaths of Kaiser, Menja, and Oni Lee as well. Come to it, arguably I had a share in all the deaths from Bakuda's explosives. I wasn't sure I could swarm the complex under without killing anyone — and I was sure that I couldn't do it in a way that would guarantee any of his prisoners wouldn't become hostages.
Given the whole Bond-villain base theme, I wouldn't have been surprised if he had a self-destruct installed.
Second, I didn't know what kind of power Coil might have, but if it was at all to scale with his organization, I did not want to find out through trial and error. I'd learned a little, at least, from what happened with Bakuda.
I folded the newspaper, tucked away my notebook, and stood.
And finally?
This afternoon would be my father's funeral.