She's Got Diplomatic Immunity, She's Got A Lethal Weapon That Nobody Sees (Patreon)

This is based on a prompt from writing-prompt-s on tumblr about a superhero whose special power is being able to talk villains down. The title is a reference to the song "The Envoy" by Warren Zevon.

The sky was completely dark – no sun, despite it being nearly 3 pm in this time zone, but no moon or stars either – when I arrived at the Watch’s headquarters. I could still see reasonably well, this being a big city with streetlights, neon signs, and well-lit buildings everywhere, but it was still eerie to look up at the sky and see total blackness. Or, to be completely honest, blackness smattered with very faint gray and pink, where the city lights were reflecting off clouds. The forcefield around the Earth was perfectly absorbent, no light reflecting off it, but it was up a lot higher than the clouds. It was late May, but I was grateful for the jacket I was wearing over my costume; it was chilly. And it was going to get chillier.

The thing about a forcefield that blocks EM radiation from reaching the Earth is that you’re generating it in space, from a satellite. There’s no other way to do it. It has to be in space to be able to encompass the whole planet, and to be honest you’ll likely need more than one. So to reach it with your own control signal, you either have to be with it in space, in which case how are you going to hear from world leaders if they’re ready to surrender? Or you have to be on the ground, and if so, how can you transmit your control signal? Most likely it’s using EM, too. So either way, you need to have a hole in the field to project through. And for various reasons, the magnetic poles are the best places to put such a thing.

The Watch, Odysseus’ team, was fairly heavy on science types – maybe not as much as the Teslanauts, but they were mostly about computers and inventions, whereas the Watch had more pure science going on. They’d identified where Dr. Spectrum’s base was, and they’d reached out to me rather than going to chase him down there themselves, bring in the Alliance of Good, or any of the other things they could have done.

“It’s in Antarctica,” Odysseus told me. “Normally with a villain’s base, we’d send Lynx in to do recon, but a cat isn’t exactly inconspicuous in Antarctica.” The cat, a slim tortoiseshell standing on the console next to him, meowed loudly. “Also, she can’t talk anymore, so it’s hard for her to give us any useful information.”

“You ought to get a telepath,” I said. “I think Zed’s freelancing now; they might be willing to work with you.”

He chuckled. “I think eight members is plenty. We’re not trying to turn into the Alliance of Good here.”

I winced. I used to be a member of the Alliance of Good, before… well, before they stopped being quite so good. At one point we’d had 27 members. Keeping track of what everyone was working on had been a logistics nightmare. “True enough. Is there a reason you’re hiring me rather than going after Dr. Spectrum yourselves?”

“No specific reason. You have an excellent track record and you talked Kage and Fallen Angel into quitting the Society of Sin; that’s how you ended up on our radar. And I always think it’s a tragedy when someone with a mind like Dr. Spectrum’s goes bad.”

I nodded. “Agreed. What’s the plan to get me in there?” I’m fairly good at martial arts, but everyone knows it’s not what I specialize in.

“Dr. Ray and the Mechanist have come up with an ice buggy that can camouflage its heat signature. Side benefit, it should keep you pretty warm. The downside is, you’ll be piloting on instruments only; there’s no way to open a port you can see through and still be able to keep Spectrum from detecting you.”

That made sense, given Dr. Spectrum’s specialty. “Instruments only implies radar. How would they not detect that?”

“Rasers,” Odysseus said, which I first mistook to mean razors, and wondered what thin, sharp blades would have to do with object detection. “Lasers using the radio wave spectrum. We aim the raser toward the ground. If it hits something, it bounces back and then you know there’s something there. If it doesn’t hit anything… it won’t refract and bounce off the ice the way a light-spectrum laser would. There may be some radio scatter, but not enough for Dr. Spectrum to be able to tell you’re coming.”

I hoped so. Dr. Spectrum was famous for using robots rather than human minions, and my martial arts skills weren’t necessarily up to taking out robots. “Do I get backup?”

“We can be on the Antarctic coast near Belgrano II, ready to move if you call us, but that’s about 800 miles from Dr. Spectrum’s base. Max safe speed for the Ice Runner is probably about 80 miles an hour, 100 if we floor it. So… yes, but backup will be eight hours away. And we can’t give you a constant signaler, so you’d have to be able to activate the signal… and it’s Dr. Spectrum. If he isn’t running a full range of jammers, I’d be very surprised.”

“Why not closer? There are Antarctic bases closer to the South Pole, right?”

“We can’t fly over. No one can; he’s got a full range of drones with radar circling the pole and looking for flying vehicles, at an altitude of around 3 miles, we think. Nothing can get closer than maybe about 200 miles on land, and further out than that in the air. Amundsen Station’s gone dark – we think he’s probably enclosed it in a radio barrier rather than killing the scientists there.”

I nodded. “The radio barrier’s more Dr. Spectrum’s style.”

“We’re pretty sure that even if his drones can see the 800-odd miles to Belgrano Station… planes come in there all the time, so he won’t consider it something to worry about. And when we factor in elevation, ease of climbing up from the ice shelf to the height of the terrain around the South Pole, and distance, Belgrano’s the closest we can get. Vostok Station’s slightly closer and already at the correct elevation, but it’s significantly further away from us because it’s on the opposite side of the pole, and it’s on the eastern side of Antarctica, where the winter storms tend to be at their most fierce. Kunlun’s closer than that but not inhabited in the winter.”

“Okay… but is there a reason we need to land at a base? My understanding is, there’s a whole lot of smooth ice in Antarctica you could use for a runway if you had to.”

He smiled wryly. “So here’s the thing. The Ice Skater – the vehicle we’re giving you – is extremely light, heavily insulated to keep off infrared scopes – it’s rated for -71 C, and while it can get down to -90 C down there, it doesn’t usually. With that much insulation, it barely requires any energy to keep you warm, and it uses hydrogen fuel cells, and it comes with enough of them that you could circumnavigate Antarctica twice before refueling. And hydrogen fuel cells emit water as their waste product. Any steam the Skater vents will desublimate to ice almost instantly. Nothing visible.”

“Nice.”

“We don’t have any other vehicles like that. The only other zero emissions vehicle we have runs on solar, which wouldn’t work in Antarctic winter even if Dr. Spectrum wasn’t blocking the sun. Everything else that’s capable of making it across the Antarctic terrain is going to be very, very visible in infrared, and is likely to produce emissions that can be seen with the right spectrography. He’s going to be able to see the Ice Runner – our main polar vehicle -- as soon as it’s within 200 miles of the pole, maybe sooner. And if we go out to the edge of what we think is his visible range, outside the earth’s curvature vis-à-vis his spy drones, and hang around there waiting for you to call… we’d have to keep the Runner heated, which in that temperature will burn fuel almost as fast as driving it would. The Skater needs to generate very little heat and is carrying more efficient fuel.”

“So if you followed me inland and stopped where he can’t see you, you run the risk of freezing to death.”

“Right.” Odysseus nodded.

“Didn’t I hear there’s a highway in Antarctica? Is that where we’re going?”

“No, that connects McMurdo Station to the South Pole, not Belgrano. And we’re not using that because McMurdo has reported seeing drones zipping up and down the highway. Remote controlled cars, basically, a little bigger than your typical RC hobby vehicle. It’s fairly obvious he thinks McMurdo is where we’d be coming in at… which makes good logical sense; it would be the best route if he wasn’t watching it.”

“Then how do we know he isn’t watching the route from Belgrano?”

“Because he can’t. The South Pole Traverse is a road, made of compacted snow and ice. It’s only so wide. He couldn’t find us if instead of using the Traverse itself, we paralleled it a mile to the east, but there’s no point in doing that because it’s a significantly longer distance than from Belgrano. We can be reasonably sure that he’s not going to waste resources searching every possible route from the coast, or from anywhere a plane can land.”

The cat pawed at Odysseus, meowing loudly, and then pointed her paw at a large analog clock with glowing hands, which was making chiming noises. Three o’clock. I didn’t know what the significance of that was, but the cat – who from my understanding was the heroine Lynx, stuck in the body of a cat since her own had been killed – seemed to think there was something.

“His deadline’s in 24 hours, now, and we’re going to burn a lot of it getting there. Are you in?”

“Of course,” I said. “Let your team know, and let’s get going.”

***

Most of the flight was spent over water, so we could travel at mach 5 without causing disruptions on the ground. In a good part of the world, supersonic speed was banned over land, except for wartime applications, which superhero work technically was not. We left the coast of the US, went out to 30 west longitude or so, and then flew more or less straight south, nothing but water underneath us. Civilian craft can’t do that; they’d run out of fuel, but the Watch’s plane ran on something else. I didn’t ask any of them what, because they’d tell me.

It was over three hours in the darkness. Dr. Spectrum’s force field was at orbital elevation, so in a plane, we couldn’t get above it. And since there are very few sources of light out on the ocean, it was a much more complete darkness than I’d experienced on, say, redeye flights from California to the East Coast. After a few minutes of trying to look out the window and realizing how little there was to see, I returned to studying Dr. Spectrum’s manifesto… the demands he’d insisted needed to be met by 3 pm tomorrow, or he’d continue to block the sun.

The deadline was nonsense, of course. It wasn’t that the issue wasn’t serious. Every day of no sun meant the planetary temperature would drop about 5 degrees Celsius, or 9 Fahrenheit. In the Watch’s city, where it was late spring and the temperature had been ranging between 70 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit, it was now a brisk 63. By 3 PM tomorrow it’d be 54-ish. Two or three more days after that and there’d be frost in most places where there had been spring or summer temperatures, killing plants that weren’t designed to take it. By the end of the week everything humanity grows to eat would be dead or going dormant, and widespread famine would ensue later in the year.

But there was nothing special about 3 pm tomorrow. Places that had been cold enough to get below freezing by then were probably either not growing anything, or were growing things that could handle a sudden frost. It said something about Dr. Spectrum that his demand essentially translated into “give me what I want by my deadline or things will continue to get worse until you finally do give in.” Crops would start dying in large numbers four days from now. Not tomorrow.

The demands themselves were… interesting. I have a lot of experience in dealing with supervillains, and what they want out of their criminal activities, and the mad scientist type usually fall into just a few categories. To begin with, they never want money. It’s always more effective to use your super-science skills to invent things and then market them if you want money, and the few who are emotionally attached to the idea of being criminals… they join teams like the Society of Sin, or they make gadgets and sell them to other supervillains.

There’s always an emotional reason. Sometimes it’s nothing butemotion. Dr. Ultraviolet just wanted the world to recognize her genius… a lot of buried insecurity there. Sometimes there’s an ideology. Gaia’s Sword worked with Dark Horse, supporting him in his plans to destroy humanity, because she was an eco-extremist who thought humanity was poisoning the Earth, and was happy to work with a sapient, super-powered horse to eliminate us, despite the fact that she was human too. Usually the ideologies are a little more normal than that; several of the ones I’ve encountered have been libertarians, who felt that, while they could be very wealthy by going legit, they could become even more wealthy if they created a world where taxation didn’t exist, first. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you get anarchists like Dr. No, who feel that all government is illegitimate.

The ones who are easiest to work with usually have some combination – a cause that’s very important to them emotionally, generally because of their own past. The Relentless Robot (who, despite what his costume makes him look like, isn’t a robot at all) was acting out against a society that had treated him as less than human. Most of his original manifesto was impractical in the extreme, but we managed to satisfy him by cutting it down to just the demand that all forms of abusive child re-education be made illegal, including gay and trans conversion therapy, ABA for autistic kids, and “scared straight” bootcamps that locate themselves in places with no government oversight so they can torture and brainwash their “students”. The heroes who’d been getting ready to attack the Robot had agreed with me that this set of demands was both achievable and laudable, and that, as heroes, we would not stand against the demand being made. It turns out that when what villains want turns out to be something any person with both a brain and a heart should want, we heroes don’t tend to be too big on stopping them with violence. I mean, they probably should have tried a public awareness campaign first… but when this sort of thing happens, it’s usually a demand for a change that the majority of the public either supports, or would support if they actually understood what was going on.

Dr. Spectrum’s demands were extreme, even beyond anything the Robot had ever come up with (and the Robot had wanted to legalize child labor so kids could run away from abusive homes and support themselves, before I got him to see how much that would end up harming the people he was trying to protect.) I could sympathize with most of them; in fact I thought a lot of them would be good common sense ideas in a world that wasn’t this one, like “confiscate all sources of plutonium worldwide and use it to power space drone explorer craft”, which sounded great until you ran into the question of, how could you confirm or enforce that? Other of his ideas were ones I sympathized with but they were entirely too revolutionary to achieve the way he was trying to go about it. “Eliminate corporate personhood” – that would completely upend the world’s economic systems, which Spectrum saw as a plus because he also wanted to destroy capitalism. The fact was, the entrenched powers-that-be wouldn’t give up corporate personhood and capitalism, the sources of their power and wealth, just because the world was going to be destroyed otherwise… we had extensive proof of that already.

No one was going to give Spectrum total dictatorial control over the whole world. Ironically some might have considered it the lesser of two evils if Spectrum was just a megalomaniacal narcissist who wanted power, but since his manifesto explained what he would do with such power, and his ideals were radical and would be extremely destructive to pretty much all members of the ruling class of every country everywhere… it wasn’t going to happen, even if we all starved to death and then froze. My job was to convince Dr. Spectrum of this… and, since he didn’t get to be a supervillain blackmailing the whole world by being reasonable, I needed to get him to channel his passion into something that had some hope of working before we were all dead.