Tales of the Red Panda: The Android Assassins (5 page)

Tank Brody's legs churned as fast as they could carry his
substantial frame through the crowd racing along the street. Behind him he
could hear the cries of men and women who had been unable to keep pace and had
fallen into the clutches of the mechanical monsters that pursued them. He raced
on, a small girl in his arms whom he had plucked from the street, terrified at
the scene of horror that surrounded her. Brody only knew one mission now. He
must get that girl to safety, and the crowd of panicked citizens for whom he
had become
de facto
leader in the
last ten minutes.

Two hours ago, it had all been so much simpler. After the
events of a few days earlier, Tank had continued to work out at Spiro's gym,
making enough small progress for the old man to keep him coming around. Brody's
natural disinclination towards violence had been overridden by his curiosity
about his fellow boxers' activities and his need to learn more.

If anything, Spiro Pappas had been far too pleased with the
change in his star pupil's attitude to notice anything untoward. Brody arrived
early and stayed late, and seemed to take a greater interest in everything
about the gym than he had before. What Spiro did not realize was that the big
man was keeping a close eye out for Andy Parker, Mac Tully or any of the other
men he had seen leave with them the other night. The men who had somehow known
about the attack on innocent people even before the police did, who had fought
tooth and nail to protect those same people, and who seemed to take orders from
that remarkable masked man whom Brody had glimpsed at a distance.

Brody had managed to learn a thing or two about
him
too, though just how much of it was
true, he couldn't begin to say. Brody had drifted to Toronto from the west
– his decline in fortunes had carried him across the prairies and into
the heart of the great, lost city like so many others who had been stripped of
everything but hope by these dark times. He knew few people in Toronto, and
even less about its lore. But when he began to quietly ask around, it seemed
that Tank Brody was the only man in town who
didn't
have something to say on the subject of the Red Panda, the
city's mysterious guardian. But most of what was said seemed too preposterous
to be true.

All manner of heroic deeds were attributed to the man. They
said the Red Panda had shut down the city's gangs time and time again and that
he protected the man in the street from threats as small as a cutthroat in an
alley with a knife to the efforts of self-styled “
supervillains
,”
a word Brody had never even heard before. He was purported to have superhuman
strength, to be a creature of the shadows, impossible to kill or even find.
Some said that he possessed eerie powers of the mind, or the skills to walk up
walls or fly, while others claimed that he was just a man with a singular drive
for justice and an unshakable will.

All who spoke of the mystery man mentioned the fearless
female who fought at his side, the Flying Squirrel. If Tank Brody was tempted
to dismiss any of their claims about this remarkable duo, the evidence from his
own eyes forbade him to do so, as he himself had seen the unmistakably female
form in grey sailing through the night air above the fray. Whomever these two
fighters might be, whatever their connection to his boxing trainer and the men
at his gym, they seemed to be able to help those whom no one else could. And
some note within that dreadful sonata of danger was music to Tank Brody's lost
soul. He had to learn more, even at risk of his own life.

Brody had not had long to wait. Two nights after the first
attack by those terrible tin men, Brody had witnessed a process similar to what
had happened the other night. Spiro was called away to a telephone behind the
desk, a telephone with a different ring from the line that jangled all day.
Brody never would have recognized the difference had he not been
listening for it, but now that he was
,
it seemed
unmistakable
. He watched through the corner of his eye as the old man
listened to the message, and replied with no more than a few words. At once, he
made an innocent looking gesture with his left hand and three men left what
they were doing around the room to speak to him.

Brody looked around the hall. No one else seemed to have
noticed a thing. If you didn't happen to be looking for it, everything seemed
casual and natural. He looked at the men. Parker and Tully were absent, but two
of those now present had left with them the other night, of that Brody
was
certain. He could not say for sure, but the third man
speaking to Spiro looked like one of the reinforcements who had arrived partway
through the past evening's battle, though of that Brody was less sure. Moments
later, the men were assembling their gear and Pappas was on the telephone
making calls, perhaps to other men not present. No one noticed when Tank Brody
followed the men out of the hall and watched them jump into a taxicab.

Brody had little to spare for frills like taxi rides, but in
this case he was prepared to make a big exception, and he ordered his driver to
follow the cab which carried the three men into what Brody was certain would be
another battle against the mechanical marvels.

As the cab approached the once-quiet neighborhood on
Dundas
, south of the University, Brody could see at once
that he was right. Already people were racing through the streets in a panic,
and the
twilight was bruised by the rough crimson of fires
burning ahead
. His taxi driver refused to carry him further, and seemed
only too glad when his burly passenger raced from the cab and set off into the
night on foot.

Tank Brody never caught up to the men from the gym, but all
around him were people badly in need of aid. Shops had been destroyed, buildings
were burning, cars overturned, and from every direction there seemed to come
cries for help. The mechanical men were back, though without the gaudy
tin-soldier paint jobs of the other night. They were tall, man-like metal
forms, devoid of markings or adornment beyond the red glow of their fearsome
eyes, and they seemed to be everywhere.

Brody could see that some of the creatures had long, metal
appendages in place of hands, which they flailed ahead of them like
whips,
burning everything they struck with an electrical
charge. The monsters had formed a solid cordon, blocking access to the main
streets and forcing their panicked victims deeper into the maze of narrow
alleys which
had made up, just hours before, a peaceful
neighborhood. It was clear that the machines intended to drive them like
cattle, but fighting them seemed impossible and there was little to do but run.
Brody quickly found that people gravitated to him, almost expecting him to be
able to protect them. But if there was anything he could do but keep them
together, keep them moving and run for their lives, he could not imagine what
it might be.

Brody could hear the clanking and whirring of the terrible
machines and knew that they had been discovered again. He shouted for the
others to keep running, not to give up, and barreled on.

Suddenly he heard a man's voice cry out from behind him.
“Look! Up there!” The voice carried an impossible note of hope, and Tank Brody
could not resist the urge to look up. There were more cries from all around as
the men and women saw what he did. Standing atop a street lamp, high above, was
a tall man in a long, grey coat and matching suit, perched impossibly as he
hurried to affix some strange device to the top of the pole with his
red-gauntleted hands. The man turned to face the people below as they stopped
running to gaze at him, and his eyes lighted upon Brody, towering above the
others with the young girl in his arms. The eyes within the crimson mask were
blank whites and they burned with a fire that Brody had never before seen, and
he gasped a little in spite of himself. It was the legend himself. Tank had
found the Red Panda.

“Keep them moving!” the man shouted in a voice like thunder,
and something deep within Tank Brody found it impossible not to obey. “Keep
moving south, the way is still clear.” The Red Panda struggled to pull up a
retractable antenna atop the device.

Suddenly another voice rang from high above. It was the girl
in grey, executing another heart-stopping aerial maneuver as she called out to
them. “Three blocks, then head east. You should hit the main drag all right if
we can hold them off.” And with that, she landed on a ledge across the street
and began to work on a matching device of her own.

“If we can cast the interference net wide enough, this has a
chance,” the Red Panda called to her before turning back to Brody. “Go!” he
commanded, and Tank Brody and his band of survivors could not have resisted had
they wished to. They raced on into the blackness, ignoring the crackle of small
explosions behind them, the screams all around them, the terror in their own
hearts.

They were nearly to the street indicated by the Flying
Squirrel when they heard another voice call out to them. “Hey!” it ordered
them. “This way! Down here!”

The group was stopped in its tracks by a
policeman in uniform holding a Thompson submachine gun
. He waved the
crowd in the opposite direction, down an alley, and Brody could not stop the
group from breaking ranks and following the officer's order. Brody followed
them reluctantly, but as he neared the officer, he stopped in his tracks. He
could see that the people who had followed him out of the inferno now stood
confused and frightened in a blind alleyway with no escape.

Brody set down the girl in his arms and shoved her behind
him instinctively. He could feel her try and cling to his arm, but he pulled it
away as quickly as he could.

“What is this?” Tank Brody asked the policeman.

“You'll find out, big man,” the officer smiled, releasing
the safety on the Thompson. “You'll all find out.”

Brody was on the officer before he could turn the muzzle of
the weapon either towards the people in the alleyway who were now crying out in
fear, or towards Brody himself. Tank threw a punch that would have made Spiro
Pappas weep for joy had he seen it, a punch that should have crippled an
ordinary man. Tank cried out in pain. It was like punching a brick wall. But
the policeman was off balance now, and Tank hit him again to keep him that way,
and then again. Every blow sent waves of agony through his hands and arms, but
still he fought on, pulling the weapon from the officer's hands as he sent him
sprawling to the ground.

Brody had just reached forward to pick up the gun when he
heard the sharp sound of police whistles nearby and a brace of heavy boots
descending upon his position.

“Stop him!” a constable cried as he barreled into Tank full
force. The policemen piled on, in spite of the cries of protest from the men
and women in the alley. It took a dozen of them to drag Tank down, and another
ten to put him out, but the fires still raged in the city when Tank Brody knew
no more.

The Flying Squirrel slumped in a chair heavily and peeled
off her cowl with a sigh. She flipped it onto the wooden table before her,
which was strewn with test tubes and laboratory equipment, and leaned forward,
elbows on the table and cupped hands supporting her face. For a moment, she
closed her eyes.

It was the silence that got her attention. It shouldn't have
been
that
quiet, even within the
confines of
their
underground lair. Her big, brown
eyes popped open and scanned the room. She couldn't see anything, but that
never meant much where he was concerned.

“I know you're looking at my cowl-head,” she said in as
threatening a tone as she could manage without lifting her face from her hands.
As much as she loved the life of daring-do that her dual identity offered her,
Kit Baxter was always mortified by the unruly red mop that a few hours wearing
the cowl turned her hair into. She was even more mortified by the fact that it
seemed to fascinate the Boss. It came across as a sort of scientific interest,
such as one might bestow upon a bizarre natural phenomenon, but it was still
the only thing she did that seemed to catch his eye and that bothered her.

He stepped from the shadows to stand beside her, his own
mask in his hand and quite pointedly looking anywhere except at his partner.
“Hmmm?” he said, pretending not to have heard.

“You're not fooling anyone, you know,” she
monotoned
without moving.

He dropped his mask on the table beside hers and took off
his right glove. “It's just… this part,” he said, holding out his hand some
eight or nine inches above her head and touching a remarkable spike of hair
– like a stalagmite, he thought, though he kept that comparison to
himself this time. “I don't know how it does that.”

She stood and tromped wearily from the crime lab as he
called after her, protesting. “All right, all right,” was all she said.

He shook his head a little. He wouldn't even admit this to
himself, but he got a giddy thrill every time she took the mask off, as if he
was seeing something forbidden, which in a way, he was. The fact that it was
often tied to a moment of silly vulnerability in her “cowl-head” display made
it all the more difficult for him to resist. The Red Panda did try awfully hard
not to think of such things, but privately he supposed that she could sense his
interest at such moments and found it distasteful. It always drove him to
behave more strictly professional. Considering his reputation as one of the
world's greatest detectives, he could not have been more wrong.

When Kit returned a few minutes later, she had clearly
doused her hair in one of the sinks and wrapped it hastily in a towel. The
splash of cold water had woken her up a little and she was ready for a bit of
banter now, but he had settled down to work and appeared not to have noticed
her absence. She sighed and stood beside him at the workbench.

Sprawled across the table were the spoils of war: a large,
battered, man-like form of an automaton, the red fire in its eyes now quite
extinguished. It was nearly complete, but for the absence of its right leg
below the knee and one of its electric-whip appendages, which was a charred
mess. She peered at it skeptically.

“Not bad, don't you think?” the Red Panda asked
absent-mindedly as he poked about.

“All bad if you ask me,” Kit grumbled.

He looked up, surprised. “Yes, I see your point,” he said,
not looking at the towel she wore like a turban. “Still, nice to have some
physical evidence to work with. Wish we could have figured a way to get more
than one,” he clucked slightly, “but still, the police will have more, and I
ought to be able to get the details for comparison purposes.”

She pulled the towel from her head and began to dry her hair
as she talked. “This doesn't seem weird to you at all, Boss?”

He glanced over, quickly decided that she did not mean her
hair, and forced his eyes back to the prone robot. “What do you mean?” he
asked.

She sighed. He was in full mad-scientist mode and couldn't
see the forest for the trees. “First we had no physical evidence at all, on
account of it blowing itself to kingdom come to try an' kill us. And now we're
sorry that we only came back with
one
complete metal man.
That sound
goofy to you?”

He put down his instruments, raised himself to his full
height and folded his hands upon the workbench. She had his attention.

Kit felt her cheeks grow hot and tried not to imagine that
she had been called upon to recite at school. “Okay,” she said, “last time around
Captain Clockwork robbed the city blind before you figured out that his
mechanical men were just puppets, that they were getting their orders from a
radio signal. Once we blocked the signal, his toys stopped in their tracks.”

“Right,” the Red Panda said, waiting for the other shoe to
drop.

“And the Captain had the brains to do what
supervillians
never do. He threw in the towel and went to
ground. Gave us nothing to work with and disappeared for months and months.”
Kit was assembling her train of thought as she spoke, but she sensed no
impatience from her mentor. He was just watching and listening. “So now he's
back,” she continued, “and he must have fixed the problem, or he wouldn't have
come back, right? But for lack of options, we
try the same
thing
,
block the signal
. Except this time the
tin men hone in on the source of the counter-signal, in this case being you
standing there flat-footed–”

He coughed his displeasure but said nothing. Kit continued
with new momentum, “And they do their very best to blow you to Hades by turning
themselves into marching bombs.” Kit locked eyes with him across the table. She
was on to something and they both knew it. “So tonight, we set up relay
stations all over the battle zone to try and blanket the whole area with the counter-signal
so they can't tell where it's coming from–”

“And they all fall over like they've fainted,” he said,
finishing her thought. “It was too easy, wasn't it?”

“Boss,” she said, “if they were still getting orders from a
signal we could monkey with, Clockwork never would have sent them back out.”
She pointed to the thing on the slab. “That is a trap.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I was with you for a while, Kit, but
that's a bit of a leap,” he said. “This sorry chap is depowered, no explosives,
not emitting a signal of any kind.”

“I still know a trap when I smell one,” she said, her eyes
narrowing.

“So you're suggesting that we only recovered this unit
because our foe wanted us to do so?” the Red Panda asked, intrigued by the
thought in spite of himself.

“I don't know what Crazy Joe wants, exactly,” the Squirrel
replied. “We got this one, and the cops have some more, and I reckon we've got
to try an' make some use of them. But I reserve the right to say I told you so,
is all.”

“That's tough, but fair,” he grinned and turned back to the
table. All traces of the smile immediately left his face. “Look at this,
Squirrel. I was hoping that examination of this automaton might give us some
clue to Captain Clockwork's true purpose,
but…,”
his
voice trailed away with his thought.

“Yes?” she said, batting her eyelashes.

“Well, look at this thing,” the Red Panda began. “The whips,
for example. No hands, no claws, no manipulative devices of any kind. Just two
long whips charged with enough electrical power to burn flesh and cause great
pain, but not enough to kill. Not enough to serve any real purpose. Captain
Clockwork's metal men were always masterpieces of form and function, designed
to fulfill a single purpose perfectly.”

“Yes,” she said quietly.

He shook his head in revulsion. “But these monsters… this
design suggests no purpose beyond terrifying innocent people and driving them
into a frenzy.”

“Right,” she said. “And therefore?”

He was silent for a moment. “That's all they were meant to
do, isn't it?” he said at last.

“Looks like.”

“But,
why
, Kit?
Why?” He growled in frustration, “What could Clockwork have to gain?”

“Are we dismissing the possibility that he's gone insane?”
she shrugged.

“I can only pray that you're wrong,” the Red Panda said
quietly. “The actions of a madman, working without plan or pattern, are almost
impossible to defend against. How many more lives would be lost if that were
the case?” He seemed almost hopeless at the thought, just for a moment, and Kit
felt compelled to try and lift his spirits somehow.

“Chin up, Boss,” she said. “It gives me the willies when
even you lose hope.”

That made him laugh a little, and he shook off the vision of
his city in ruins and fear of his own failure that had haunted him for an
instant. He looked at the mechanical man again and seemed to come to a
decision. He began to put away the tools he had been setting up for the
examination.

“What's up?” she asked. “I wanted to see you make Pinocchio
dance.”

“I think it's time that I admitted I'm not always the best
man for the job,” he said with a smile.

“I have no idea what job you could possibly mean,” she said
with a gleam in her eye, “but I know it doesn't interest
me
very much.”

They both stopped short, just for a moment. Kit blushed beet
red and failed to notice that his face was almost the same color. That was
probably a little too bold, but she was pretty tired and it had just slipped.
After a small, awkward moment their eyes met across the table.

“Kit Baxter, behave yourself?” she asked.

“My very thought,” he said a little awkwardly, assuming that
he was still being teased about his earlier interest somehow. “Furthermore, I
thought that, since we only have one of these monsters to examine, we might
make use of a better brain than mine.”

Kit did not think that such a thing existed, but this did
not seem like the moment to say so, and he could only be talking about one man.
“You
gonna
take the tin man to meet Doctor C?”

The Red Panda nodded. Doctor Theodore
Chronopolis
was officially employed within the Ancient Studies department of the museum,
but his brilliance extended to every field of scientific inquiry, and he had
never failed to surprise the masked marvels when they had sought his aid. “I
was thinking he might be able to turn up something that I might miss. We can't
afford to take chances with people's lives.”

She nodded grimly. “Well, I'll give it to you on points. If
nothing else, the Doc isn't likely to get called away to fight some ninjas or
an undead warlock or something. At least, I sure hope not,” she said. Kit was
very fond of Doctor
Chronopolis
, but there was a fine
line between genius and madness, and she couldn't tell on which side the Doc
was doing a foxtrot at any given moment. Still, it couldn't hurt to get his two
cents.

She was drawn from her reverie by the ringing of a red
telephone in the corner of the room. It was Mother Hen's line, and that usually
didn't mean anything good.

He lifted the receiver. “Report,” was all he said.

Kit watched him closely. His face could be an impassive mask
when he willed it to be, impossible to read, but she was certain that she saw
him turn pale at what he heard. He listened for a full minute without speaking.
“Understood,” he said at last and hung up the receiver.

“What is it?” she asked. “What's happened?”

“I know now what these monsters were driving people
towards,” he said, crossing the room and pulling out a map of the area in which
the battle had raged tonight. He pointed a finger towards a dead-end alley on
the map. “Here,” he said, then moved his finger to two more such secluded
spots, blocks away from the first, and each other. “Here, and here. In each of
these locations, police and
clean-up
crews found
dozens of bodies, riddled with machine-gun fire.”

“What?” she gasped. “I didn't see any robots with guns!”

“No,” he said quietly. “Nor did I.
But it
happened, and right under our noses.
These monsters attacked and drove
innocent people before them like cattle. And when they had them where they
wanted them, there was a slaughter. Sixty-two dead in all.”

“Boss,” she whispered, her hands trembling a little in rage,
“it… it doesn't make any sense! There was nothing of value there! No profit to
be made! And even if there was, what could possibly be worth that kind of
mass-murder?”

“I don't know,” he said, turning for the door. “I'm heading
to the morgue to see if there's anything more we can learn tonight. You should
sleep.”

“You get the strangest ideas sometimes,” she said, pushing
her mass of wet hair back into her cowl and racing along beside him.