Cross Fire Read online

  He finally came to another grille. The slits were so narrow he had to press his face against it to see anything. From this vantage point, he noticed wiring diagrams on whiteboards and testing circuits on long tables. Two hazmat suits hung on a rack. It had to be the laboratory.

  Rory scooted back, and then removed the vent grille with the screwdriver tool of his four-in-one scout knife. He could then see that it was indeed a laboratory, with the sterile white walls that Uncle Aesop had mentioned, along with oscilloscopes and other instrumentation. Getting down there safely was going to be a problem, however. It was a twenty-foot drop to the floor, and there seemed to be nowhere to climb down.

  “What are you waiting for? Start moving!” shouted his uncle on the speaker. The RE-1’s camera lens was capturing everything for his uncle to view remotely.

  “How? I could break my arm, or even my neck.”

  “Your mother might be enduring something far worse,” Uncle Aesop said.

  That was all Rory needed to keep going. His mother could be paralyzed, pinned under a rock, unable to move. Perhaps that’s why no one had found her yet. It would be tough for even Superman to find someone who couldn’t signal that they needed to be rescued.

  Rory braced himself to jump. But he didn’t make the plunge. It might not be his bones that would break, but RE-1.

  He undid the straps that tied the robot to his back. His uncle had installed spinner blades that folded downward from each corner of the case. He claimed the blades could support a heavy weight, yet did not have the opportunity to test them.

  That test would have to fall on Rory’s shoulders.

  Rory straightened the poles of each of the four spinner blades so they stood upright. Putting RE-1 on his back, he retied the straps, tighter than before. Then, after a deep breath, he switched on the spinners and dropped from the vent.

  But he didn’t drop. He hovered. Twenty feet over the ground. The spinner blades rotated so quickly they held Rory aloft.

  He reached back to the case and pushed a button to power down a single blade. When it stopped spinning, he fell a few feet until the other blades took up the slack. How long the wheezing motors would last, he wasn’t going to wait and see. He powered down a second blade, a third, and then the final one, dropping to the floor in spurts. He landed on his chest with a bone-shaking thud, but when he stood, all his bones, along with RE-1, were intact.

  “You okay?” asked his uncle.

  “Yeah,” Rory said, sniffing. “All that dust irritated my allergies, though.”

  “If you just do what I tell you to do, you’ll be out of there soon. Fix the camera so I can see the surroundings.”

  Rory hoisted RE-1 up on his back and swiveled the lens over his shoulder. He turned in a full circle to give his uncle a full view. “That better?”

  “Aha! I knew it was here!” his uncle said.

  Rory kept turning. “What? Where?”

  “On the table to your right, at three o’clock—no, rotate the other way—there’s the casing for an AI brain,” relayed his uncle. “Open it to gain access to the motherboard. The processor’s inside.”

  Swinging his camera with him, Rory saw tools and circuit probes cluttering the table. In the center lay a metal sphere from which wires ran out of a back panel. “Is this it?”

  “Yes, yes—open it!”

  Rory got out his screwdriver tool and stepped over to the sphere.

  “Hello there,” said a digitized voice. Two glowing green orbs lit up on the front plate of the sphere. Rory froze.

  “What are you doing? Don’t stop!” his uncle said.

  “It just … talked to me,” Rory whispered.

  “Of course it did—it’s a real robot!”

  A real robot. Not some radio-controlled drone, but a machine that could imitate human behavior and thinking. Could it recognize that Rory was frightened? Could it determine what he was about to do?

  “It is nice to meet you,” said the robot head. “Do you have a name?”

  “Yeah.” He approached, slowly. “Rory.”

  His uncle huffed over RE-1’s speaker. “Don’t talk to it! Just get the processor!”

  “I don’t have a name yet, only a designation,” said the robot head. “Test unit nineteen-thirty-three.”

  Rory rotated the head around to unscrew the back panel. Despite what his uncle had said, he continued talking. “My friend Ellie would be sad they didn’t give you a name.”

  “Sad?” Servos whirred inside its head. “My internal dictionary says that ‘sad’ is the antonym of happy. It is an emotional state when humans do not feel one hundred percent.”

  Rory pulled off the back panel. “That’s a pretty good definition.”

  “Presently I am only seventy-eight percent complete.” The robot’s eyes dimmed to a lower setting. “So according to that definition, I am sad.”

  “You and me both.” Rory peeked inside the robot’s head. His Maglite revealed a spaghetti tangle of wires around a silicon motherboard.

  “Stop blabbing and cut those wires,” Uncle Aesop ordered.

  Rory tilted his head toward RE-1’s mic. “But if I cut them, I’ll deactivate the robot.”

  “What’s worth more to you—a robot or your mother’s life?”

  Alarms started to blare through the complex. Emergency lights flashed. He must’ve triggered something. Perhaps there were cameras inside the laboratory. He didn’t have much time. Security would be here soon.

  “Do it!” yelled his uncle, his voice testing the limits of RE-1’s speaker. “Cut them now or you won’t be able to get out!”

  Rory had no choice. He popped out the blade of his scout knife, slid it underneath the tangle of wires, and sawed them apart.

  The eyes on the robot head darkened. The speaker mouth went mute. Rory felt terrible. After this was all said and done, and his mother was found, he vowed to resolder the connections and revive the brain.

  “Now the processor,” his uncle said.

  Under the cut wires, he located the square AI chip snug in its motherboard socket. It boggled his mind that something so small could pack so much computing power. Since it was too delicate to use his knife to pry it loose, he wiggled it free with his fingers.

  “Put it back,” said a gravelly voice that wasn’t his uncle’s.

  Out from the shadows and flashing alarms strode a tall man. He was cowled in a black mask that revealed only his eyes and the lower part of his face. Ridges on each side of the mask crested like savage ears. He wore matching black boots, black gloves, and a long black cape. The muscles of his chest and legs were well defined under the tight weave of his gray bodysuit. A Utility Belt laden with accessories and tools was cinched around his waist.

  Emblazoned on his chest was a bat with its wings spread.

  Rory gasped, out of wonder—and fear. He was looking at none other than Batman. The Batman.

  “Get out of there!” Uncle Aesop screamed.

  But Batman’s stare held Rory in place. There was little chance of escape from a vigilante whom newspapers called the “Caped Crusader.” He’d apprehended some of Gotham City’s most infamous villains. Rory was no cunning criminal, just a kid.

  “I won’t repeat my request,” Batman said.

  Rory gulped. Barely clinging onto the chip in his trembling hands, he started to reach into the robot head to the motherboard socket.

  He lost his footing on the floor.

  But he didn’t fall. He rose.

  The spinner blades on the RE-1 had switched on, all four at once, launching him twenty feet into the air. His uncle must have issued the command remotely. Rory bopped his head on the ceiling and bounced against a wall. No sooner did he get his bearings than something came at him fast. A boomerang in the shape of a bat.

  It connected with his spinner blades and stopped all four of them dead. Falling, Rory flailed out with his arms. Another Batarang whirled at him. It caught the side of his Metros tee and propelled him backward, tacking him
to the wall.

  Rory dangled by a stretch of T-shirt fabric, amazed by Batman’s incredible aim. His precision throw had stopped Rory dead in his tracks without even grazing his arm.

  “You done, kid?” Batman asked.

  Rory wanted to say yes. He wanted to turn himself over to Batman. He wasn’t made for missions like this. But if he did, he’d have to surrender the AI processor. Batman would undoubtedly bring him to the authorities, who would question him to no end. The search for his mother would end before it even started.

  “Sorry, Batman.”

  Kicking both feet against the wall, Rory launched himself at the vent, ripping his T-shirt in the process. He whacked the opposite wall with his chin, but also caught the edge of the vent. Using all his strength, he heaved himself up through the opening, and then shimmied down the shaft on all fours. A third Batarang, attached to a trip wire, clanged behind him, missing his sneakers by inches.

  Worming through the ventilation ducts, Rory realized that Batman could’ve used more extreme measures to capture him. Despite his frightful costume and tough guy methods, the masked vigilante had a sense of honor.

  Rory hoped that if Batman ever learned the truth about his mom’s situation, Batman would understand that Rory was trying to act honorably, too.

  Batman deactivated the building’s alarms and gave himself a few minutes before he went outside. The dirt bike he’d previously seen in the weeds was gone. The boy had gotten away.

  Good. Everything had gone as planned.

  Batman returned to his vehicle and radioed Alfred. “Is the tracer set?”

  “It deployed from your Batarang onto the boy’s shirt beautifully,” Alfred responded. He had remained behind in the Batcave to monitor the situation. “Sending tracking data now to the Batmobile. Tracer location will be red.”

  The dashboard screen displayed a top-down map of the Gotham City–Metropolis bridge. A red marker blinked in the blue area that represented the surrounding waterway.

  Batman gritted his teeth. “Don’t even tell me he’s swimming.”

  “Not that deep,” Alfred said. “He must have found the beacon and hurled it into the bay. Our little thief’s smarter than we thought.”

  Indeed he was—or whoever was behind him.

  “You have any idea as to his motivation?” Batman asked. That was the real question behind all of this. What twelve-year-old kid would break into a high-security laboratory and steal an advanced artificial intelligence processor? It didn’t make sense. Someone must be using the boy as a tool. And that someone was the person Batman wanted to catch.

  “None at the moment,” Alfred said. “But did I hear the boy use the name Rory?”

  “That’s what he told the AI, yes,” Batman said. “Do a search query on both his name and WayneTech. Maybe he’s related to one of the employees.”

  “Commencing database search now,” Alfred said. Photos of numerous employees flashed by on the dashboard screen. “This is interesting.”

  The screen showed the profile of one Amelia Greeley. She was a midlevel engineer at WayneTech specializing in robotics. Over her couple of years with the company, she had earned stellar performance reviews. But there was a flag on her file.

  Batman grimaced. Alfred’s sigh was audible over the radio.

  Amelia Greeley was among those still missing after Wayne Tower collapsed.

  After a deep breath, Batman proceeded to click through her records. She had noted on her insurance information that she had one son, named Rory.

  Still, none of this added up as to why the kid would do what he did. Retaliation for a past grievance? Revenge?

  “Birth records reveal another interesting family connection,” Alfred said.

  A second set of records appeared on the screen. Her maiden name, before her marriage, had been Aesop.

  Just seeing the name incensed Batman. “I hope she’s not related to him.”

  “I’m afraid she’s the mad doctor’s sister,” Alfred said.

  Batman started the engine. Things were beginning to fall into place. The kid’s uncle was none other than the former chief scientist of WayneTech, Doctor Babrius Aesop, who had been committed to Arkham Asylum for threats against humanity.

  “I think we have a suspect,” Batman said.

  Buried in the rambling blog post about the Arkham Asylum cover-up, the rise in Gotham City criminal activity, and conspiracy theories concerning alien “Supermen” was a nugget of information that Clark felt he had to investigate. A vagrant reported seeing someone who matched Doctor Aesop’s description wandering about Gotham City’s seedy warehouse district, near the old Gotham Gimbals factory. Since Arkham Asylum claimed no one had escaped, the matter had not been investigated.

  Until now.

  Landing behind an adjacent warehouse, Clark changed back into his reporter attire and made his way toward the abandoned factory on foot. He did not want the sight of Superman to scare off Aesop or any other potential informant. Clark knew he could get in trouble at the Daily Planet for missing the telethon to come here. But he was also certain all would be forgiven if he uncovered a great story, like finding an escaped criminal.

  Even if he didn’t find anything here, Clark could still dash off a piece about the telethon for the newspaper’s website. Telethons were televised after all. A quick call to the Daily Planet offices guaranteed that the event would be recorded, for Clark’s “research.”

  Lois would be proud at his resourcefulness. This was something she would do.

  His shoes crunched on broken bottles as he approached the decrepit building. Most of its windowpanes had been long since smashed. Graffiti painted its brick front. What remained of a termite-infested door dangled from a rusty hinge. Clark pushed it open and stepped inside.

  “Hello?”

  He heard nothing except the squeak of the door shutting behind him. Moonlight slanted through the windows, revealing that the inside fared no better than the outside. Weeds had broken through floor tiles to flourish around workbenches. Mice squeaked from antique machinery, while an owl hooted from a roof beam. Like sprinkles of metallic stardust, stainless-steel filings covered the tables where workers assembled gimbals for use in everything from camera tripods to handheld compasses. The gimbals themselves rusted in moldy wooden crates and decomposed cardboard boxes. Clark didn’t know when the factory had closed, but from the thick layer of dust on everything, he guessed many years ago.

  There was a click, almost too faint for a normal person to hear, but not for one with the gifts of Clark Kent. He whirled and saw a figure in a white lab coat and mended eyeglasses emerge from stairs that descended below. Clark assumed the bulky object in the man’s hand was a weapon of some sort given that it was pointed at Clark.

  “Who are you?” the man demanded.

  Clark wasn’t afraid of the weapon. He was, after all, nearly invulnerable. But to disclose those powers here, right now, would reveal that he was Superman. He raised both hands. “I’m a reporter for the Daily Planet. I’m here requesting an interview with Doctor Babrius Aesop.”

  “How did you come here of all places?”

  Clark shrugged. “I was just following a lead.”

  “Did anyone join you?”

  Clark shook his head. “It’s just me. No one else.”

  The man came closer, squinting at the badge on Clark’s lanyard. “Clark Kent,” the man said, chewing over his name. “Is the Daily Planet still the biggest newspaper in Metropolis?”

  Clark nodded. “Both print and digital.”

  “And what’s the purpose of this interview?”

  It was a good question. Clark had been so focused on getting the story that he hadn’t thought about his angle. “I … I’m interested in covering the rise in crime in Gotham City.”

  “I’m no criminal,” the man said.

  Clark’s questions were working. The man had confirmed he was indeed Aesop. “I didn’t mean to suggest you were, sir. Though I have heard you were being tre
ated at Arkham—”

  “That was a crime done to me!” Aesop’s words echoed through the factory. He lowered his voice. “I’ve been against crime my entire life.”

  “Perhaps you can explain that to our readers?” Clark asked nicely.

  Weapon twitching in his grasp, Doctor Aesop pondered over the request. Clark noticed there were no lenses in his frames. His beard growth was uneven and his hair had been sloppily cut. Yet his eyes possessed an intelligence Clark couldn’t deny.

  “Okay. You want to write about crime, I’ll tell you about crime.” Aesop dropped the weapon into a pocket in his lab coat, but kept his hand in that pocket.

  Clark took out his notebook and pen. “Then let’s start at the beginning. I’ve read you were an engineer at WayneTech.”

  “I was the chief scientist—until they stole my designs for artificial intelligence.”

  “That’s a serious charge,” Clark said.

  Aesop snarled. “It’s one that everyone in Gotham City should know. Bruce Wayne and his minions should not be trusted.”

  Clark jotted down the quote in shorthand. “Do you have any proof?”

  “Do I have proof?” Aesop laughed. “Follow me, Clark Kent.”

  He took Clark across the factory floor into a dark room where he turned on a portable flood lamp. It sat on a warped desk with a laptop computer, wires, and what looked like electronic instruments. He inserted a flash drive into the laptop. A few keystrokes later, Aesop turned the laptop screen toward Clark. “Here’s your proof.”

  Clark flipped through the images of sophisticated engineering schematics.

  “You’re looking at the future of drone technology,” Aesop said. “Nothing like the feebleminded reconnaissance craft the military uses or the package droppers that we have now. Drones that are fully autonomous. Intelligent. Able to make informed decisions and interact with human beings at conversational level.”

  “Incredible,” Clark said.

  Those intelligent eyes blazed. “Imagine the applications. Military, domestic, retail. Intelligent flying machines that could serve as everything from traffic cameras and pizza deliverers to terrorist hunters and aerial police. The people of Metropolis and Gotham City would have no need of Batman or Superman because my drones would catch the criminals faster!”