Veldron 19

Veldron's Saga 19: Return to the Lair

Well, that had been a fun little adventure.

I'd never really had anything to do with Seer, and the rumours about him seemed entirely untrue. The way it was told, he was an unstoppable god who could look into your soul and steal your thoughts, leaving you a lifeless shell. But he was almost never seen on the battlefield.

Empathy was an inherent part of mind reading, so it made sense that people like Seer wouldn't be prone to violence – "do unto others" has a lot more impact when you feel every punch you throw. It also made sense that they would become defenders of the innocent, for similar reasons. That or become isolated misanthropes.

Why he had helped me was another issue. That escape had been far too easy. He was probably fed up with the situation and had been against my capture from the start, but he still should've put up a fight, if only to protect the location of the base.

Which raised another good question. Where was I?

I was driving some sort of armoured van through the desert. Harsh wind whipped up dust and erased the van's tracks behind me. It was hot outside, very hot, and apart from the entrance into the Squad's base disappearing into the distance there was nothing but sand in sight. Well, that explained the lax security; the desert itself was a barrier. My choices were presumably to
starve lost in the desert or turn around and surrender.

Ha. I'm Veldron, and I had a van.

Once I was suitably out of sight of the base I stopped the van and, covering my nose and mouth with one tattered sleeve to protect myself from sand, got out. A quick check revealed that the van had both emergency water reserves and a radio, natural precautions in the desert. There was no petrol besides what was in the tank. I grabbed the emergency toolbox from the back and got to work on the radio.

It wasn't very powerful and the sand was extremely irritating, but I was soon talking to CYBR. She had limited access to some of my satellites and used them to find my position, and I got back in the van and kept driving. Well, technically they were Shadow's and Devnull's satellites; I'm not sure if either were aware that I'd kept using them after selling them but they never said anything.

About twelve hours later we were leaving the desert behind. CYBR's metal was hot in the sun but I didn't complain. We travelled using a complicated series of leaps and rocket-bursts that CYBR had worked out to optimise speed and fuel efficiency, although not necessarily my health. There was no way she had enough rocket fuel to get us out of the desert that way.

I felt like an idiot when she paused shortly before running out to access a cache she'd left there in the way in. She had an extremely reliable GPS (my design) and we found a town soon enough. Turned out we were in Saudi freaking Arabia. Neither of us could communicate with the locals.

CYBR had stashed a synthetic skin to wear, but she was all but out of fuel. She'd had to travel across two countries to get to me and neither of us had much in the way of connections in Saudi Arabia. Our physical natures made air travel risky and I had no way to contact my island. It would take time to rig up a new remote control for it.

We played a backpacking couple and got jobs cleaning some low-budget motel in some town; it was one of the few places we could find where the boss spoke English and didn't mind employing suspicious foreigners. We had to make up fake passports and so forth but it wasn't hard. My wounds healed over a couple of weeks while we played civilian and I worked on recreating my remote. I borrowed nonvital systems from CYBR to do so.

She seemed strangely happy to help me, but then it was hard to predict CYBR's actions. She never really had grand plans of her own, but she wasn't a contractor either; she helped out with a lot of things if you caught her when she had nothing better to do. If she needed lots of money for something, she robbed someone; if she wanted something, she went and got it, much like how she'd broken me out of prison because she wanted a few upgrades and had nowhere easier to get them. She's amazingly uncomplicated like that. And when she doesn't particularly need anything, she'll go along with whatever looks fun. I was going to have to pay her back for the fuel she used getting there, though.

My island turned out to be remarkably close, once I'd worked the bugs out of the remote. The strange lack of hero activity following me suggested that the Squad might have decided to focus on other things, but I was still nervous about trying to get into my base again, especially without any of my scanning equipment. We headed for the coast, bluffing our way through the odd security cordon as we passed through countries that were presumably at war with each other; I'd never bothered to keep up with that stuff.

Hoping that Neria hadn't reappeared (or at least that she'd lost interest), I hired a small boat to get to the island. We performed a quick sweep and decontamination of the island surface for bugs and trackers and then resubmerged immediately once CYBR and I were inside, without incident.

The place was a wreck.

The doors had all held, but several walls and machines bore scorch marks and long melted strips. I stepped over a couple of deformed robot carcasses, limbs welded at strange angles. They had been guard robots.

Following the signs of battle told a simple story. StarFyre had not hung around to investigate very much after escaping her cell; the labs, storage and my throne room were practically untouched. The autodefence had tried to stop her at first but moved to helping after she'd melted enough things to make it clear that she was a danger inside the base. I was glad of that; if she'd had to break her way through the door my base would be flooded with seawater.

I repaired the systems I'd cannibalised from CYBR and dropped her off somewhere near America a few days later, telling her to spread the word that I wanted to talk to Shadow. My time with the Ultimate Justice Squad had been quite informative, really, and I intended to make use of that.