Tales of the Red Panda: The Android Assassins (3 page)

Tank Brody froze in his tracks, unable to accept what his
eyes told him. Parker, Tully and the others from the gym were engaged in a
furious running battle with what appeared to be
two dozen
full-sized toy soldiers! Painted bright red and blue like tin toys in a shop
window, the ferocity of their attack proved that these creations were anything
but innocent. The mechanical men were themselves the source of the whirring and
clanking sounds, and if Tank had any doubt that the tin soldiers were exactly
what they appeared to be, then the way those terrible toys took round after
round of gunfire without apparent damage dispelled such thoughts immediately.

Tank looked quickly at his surroundings. It was clear that
since the men had moved to engage the mechanical monsters, the damage to the
shops and innocent passersby had stopped. Tank could not imagine just what
these men might be doing, or on whose behalf, but they appeared to be the only
resistance to this incredible attack. Brody could hear police whistles at a
distance but there was no sign of the blue coats yet. He picked up a woman he
found lying unconscious in the road and carried her to safety through the
shattered doorway of one of the shops. She was bleeding from a wound in her
scalp, but not badly. Brody found shelter for the woman between the fallen
shelves of the ruined store, his eyes darting to the scene of horror out in the
street as he did so. The tin soldiers bore what appeared to be muskets, but
each seemed to fire an unlimited number of shots. Parker and Tully's small band
of fighters seemed to have been newly reinforced by the arrival of at least two
more gunmen, from where Brody could not say.

Tank heard more police whistles, closer now, and almost left
his place rather than be discovered and questioned, but the sight he saw next
stopped him cold in sheer amazement. From the buildings high above, a tall man
in a long grey coat swung in on some kind of grappling line. Shouting
instructions Brody could not hear to the men below, the man released the rope
while still at an impossible height, and turned the force of his fall into a
viscous kick to the midsection that decimated one of the mechanical monsters.
The tall man flipped over the falling form of the broken toy soldier and landed
on his feet as gently as a cat. It was impossible to say from this distance,
but Brody would have sworn that he saw a bright red mask on the tall man's
face.

Suddenly, as if at some unspoken command, every single one
of the mechanical men turned and moved quickly towards the valiant newcomer.
Ignoring the volleys of gunfire around them, and even eschewing their own
weapons, the tin soldiers closed ranks at top speed and made for the man in the
mask.

Four small explosions tore through the monsters, and for an
instant Brody was sure that he saw their point of origin: a small grey shape,
like a woman, flying through the air above the fray. She appeared to be coming
in to land beside the man in the mask, but he waved her off with a cry and she
landed instead on a lamppost before taking to the air again. Closer and closer
the tin men got, surrounding their target on all sides, until at last, in
perfect unison, they rushed the man in the mask, closing the distance with
astonishing speed. At the last instant, the bodies of the mechanical men were
torn apart by tremendous explosions which engulfed the area in a great fireball,
the brilliance of which blinded Tank Brody from his vantage point almost two
blocks away.

When his eyes adjusted a moment later, he could see a
still-smoking crater in the pavement and shattered glass falling from windows
all around. But of the army of mechanical monsters, the brave fighters who
opposed them or the remarkable man in grey there was not a single sign.

“Peters!” a gravelly voice boomed from down the hallway,
making the lanky man jump in his seat. Jack Peters was behind a desk that
seemed two sizes too small for him in a cramped office filled with filing
cabinets. It was just the sort of palatial surroundings that you might expect
if you happened to be the star reporter for the
Toronto Chronicle
, which Jack Peters was.

Jack happened to be leaning back in his chair about to enjoy
a cup of lukewarm, stale coffee freshened up ever so slightly with an equal
part of bourbon. He called it the “Newsman's Good Night,” and he felt no
compulsion to hide it just because Editor Pearly was coming.
Pearly's
bark was worse than his bite, though many remarked
that his bark was bad enough to make up for it.

“Three, two, one,” Peters counted under his breath. The door
burst open and a solid mass of disgruntled newspaperman filled the space, his
teeth grinding in irritation and a copy of the morning
Chronicle
clutched in his paw.

“Peters!” Editor Pearly repeated. “What in the Sam Hill do
you think you're playing at?”

“Good morning, Tim,” Peters said with the calm that comes
from long practice of dealing with the storm. “Is that the bulldog?”

“Of course it's the bulldog,” Pearly grunted, waving the
paper in his hand. “What else would it be?”

“You might be working on your origami swans,” Peters said,
taking a long pull from his cup. “I hear they're all the rage this season.”

“Don't crack wise,” Pearly snapped. “Would you like to
explain what I'm looking at, Mister Peters?”

Jack peered over the rim of his cup. “It appears to be our
coverage of last night's dramatic attack by oversized tin soldiers,” he said.

“I know what it is!” Pearly exploded.

“Then why did you–
”

Pearly declined to give his ace reporter a chance to finish
his comeback. “Do you know what is missing from this report, Jack? The news!
The biggest story in weeks, maybe months, and you forgot to bring the news!”
Pearly slapped the bulldog edition of the morning paper down on Peters' desk.
“Look at this,” he grunted. “Page after page of eyewitness reports in
exhaustive detail. It looks like you talked to every Sally Sob-Story who got
her stockings torn in this fracas, and the night editor tells me this is only a
tiny fraction of the interviews you took!”

“So what if it is?” the reporter shrugged.

“So what if it…” Pearly crumpled the newspaper in his hand
in frustration. “Jack, for the love of St. Thomas Aquinas,
have
a little perspective. Yes, the people want to know what happened, but they also
want to know
why
it happened! They
want to know who's responsible, and if there's any chance that it might happen
on their street tonight! Those are the questions we have to answer if we want
their nickel, Jack, and you know that. So you get enough on-the-spot material
to give the piece color and then high-tail it downtown to try and get some
answers to those questions!”

In deference to his boss' high dudgeon, Jack Peters removed
his size thirteen feet from the desktop and leaned his increasingly heavy head
on his left hand.

“Listen, Chief. There were two other
Chronicle
men on the scene, and they both beat it with
O'Mally's
boys to do just that. They came up with exactly
what I knew they would come up with – nothing.”

“Confound it, Jack,” Pearly began.

Peters raised his hand. “I have, through my usual mix of
cunning and guile, gotten my hands on the bulldog editions of the
Telegraph
and the
Sentinel
, and they have pages and pages of nothing much under their
great big headlines. And do you know why?”

Editor Pearly scowled and said nothing. Jack decided to tell
him anyway. “Because every reporter they had on the scene cased after the Chief
of Police, or the Mayor or anybody official-looking, hoping someone would say
the name they wanted to hear: Captain Clockwork. Everybody was looking for an
official release on the
supervillain
angle, and none
of them got it. And they didn't get it because the tin men blew themselves
sky-high and left no official evidence behind. But since yours truly spent
hours on the scene talking to anybody and everybody who saw anything, I came up
with just enough good citizens willing to say it
sounded
like Captain Clockwork was back that Bones was able to pull
all the old files from his last crime spree and run a special section.”

“I saw the special section,” Pearly snapped.

“And did you also see this page of interviews on the scene?”
Peters asked proudly, smoothing out the rumpled paper on his desk. “It's pretty
compelling stuff, Chief, even by my standards.
Ordinary folks
in an ordinary neighborhood who found themselves torn apart by a small army of
mechanical men.
Working men, housewives, kids, old folks, shopkeepers,
giving the story as they saw it, and there were dozens more we didn't have
space to print. The
Chronicle
is the
only paper with anything real to report, Chief. So mind telling me what's got
you in a lather this early?”

Pearly sighed and chewed on the stem of his unlit pipe. He sat
on the edge of Peters' desk and was silent for a moment. “Jack,” he began at
last, “when I stole you away from the
Sentinel
–”

“
Aww
for
Crimeny's
sake, Tim, how long ago was that?” Peters interrupted.

“The reason that I brought you in was not just the quality
of your work. And it certainly wasn't for your winning personality,” Pearly
grimaced. “It was because you always seemed to have your nose in these
impossible crimes, and you always seemed to have the skinny before anybody
else. Now I had a guess as to why that was. Can you imagine what that guess
might have been?”

Jack Peters was silent. Pearly smiled grimly. “Yeah. I
thought you might,” he said. “I'm not saying you did a bad job, Jack. I'm not
saying that I disagree with you when you say we have the best coverage in the
city.
But you went a hundred and eighty degrees in the
opposite direction from where your instincts would have sent you, and I've been
a newspaperman long enough to know that for dead certain.
The reason
every other reporter in town was looking for an official word on who sent these
monsters, or why they were turned loose on the city, is that if their paper was
the only one that missed that story, they'd have been out of a job so fast the
door would break the sound barrier before it hit them in the fanny.”

Jack grinned. “Even when I do good, you can't resist
threatening to fire me, can you, Chief?”

Pearly narrowed his eyes and held his star reporter's gaze,
hard. “Confound it, Jack, I'm still the Editor around here. And I need to make
sure that my reporters are working for
me
,
you understand?
Because if you're taking your orders from
someone else, you can go and publish a handbill in your basement.
Understand?”

Peters shifted in his chair a little. Things were getting a
little too close to the truth for comfort. “Tim, I don't know what you're
talking about,” he began. “That was a nice quiet neighborhood that got
shellacked last night.
Couple of blocks from Christie Pitts.
No banks, no jewels. No rich swells.
Just a nice family
neighborhood in the middle of the city.
Last time we saw tin soldiers
like this, that maniac Captain Clockwork was using them to hit big-money
targets. An army of disposable soldiers raking it in all over town.”

“Until the local mystery man figured out their weakness.”
Editor Pearly watched Peters for a reaction.

Peters shrugged. “If that's what happened,” he said. “In any
case, once his rackets were rumbled, Clockwork crawled back under the icebox
and hasn't been heard from since.”

“Until now,” Pearly nodded grimly.

“Sure, but why, Chief? I took one look at that neighborhood
and all the damage to the shops, to say nothing of the smoking hole in the
ground that was all that was left of the main attraction, and knew that the
usual stuff wasn't
gonna
cut it today.” Peters took a
sip of the concoction in his cup. “Instincts are important, and knowing when to
ignore them is, too. We won today, Chief, and we've got more background info
than we can use if these attacks keep up.”

“Why would they keep up?” Pearly scowled.

“If I knew that, I'd know why last night went down the way
it did. And if I knew that, you'd have read about it in the bulldog. Tearing
apart innocent people like
that…,”
Peters trailed off.
“It's an act of madness, Tim. Best we can do is
hang
on for the ride.”

Pearly nodded and stood. “Just as you say, Jack. But don't
forget what I said. And get some sleep, you look like hell.” And with that, he
was gone.

Jack Peters breathed a long sigh of relief. He had always
known that Editor Pearly had his suspicions about him. Heck, when Jack was
still at the
Sentinel
he had been
kidnapped once by gangsters who thought he had a line to the Red Panda. But
nothing had ever been proven, and it wouldn't do to change that now. He looked
at the mountain of eyewitness reports on his desk. They were copies, made for a
very specific purpose that Tim Pearly would not have approved of at all.

Peters' telephone rang, jarring him from his reverie.
“Peters,” he said into the mouthpiece. In response he heard a series of clicks
as if the call were no longer being routed by the normal telephone system,
which was true.

“Mother Hen calling,” said a female voice calmly on the
other end of the line.

“Hello, Mother dear,” Jack said. “How is every little
thing?”

“Same as usual, Jack,” came the voice.

“That bad, huh?” Peters snorted. “Listen, I got the stack of
eyewitness reports you asked for, is someone coming 'round to collect them so I
can turn into a pumpkin?”

“Leave the window open, Jack. They'll be gone when you get
back in.”

Peters raised an eyebrow. “The personal touch, no less. So I
take it the big fella wasn't blown to bits after all? I'm glad to hear it,
though he got me in
dutch
with the boss tonight, I'll tell you that.”

Mother Hen's smile was audible. “He knows, Jack. And he's
made it up to you. When you get back to the office, you'll find there are two
city officials willing to go on record to you and only you.”

“And what will they tell me?” Jack said with his fingers
crossed.

“What every paper in town is dying to print, Jack,” the voice
promised. “Captain Clockwork is back in town!”