Chapter Text
The briefing room was a small amphitheater with concrete walls and floors, illuminated by old Cold War incandescent bulbs. That made sense, since it was buried deep under the Mountain, on Level 22. This high up, they were still rubbing shoulders with USAF personnel. The lower you went, the more you saw Pilots and their support personnel.
A dozen people sat on the benches that ringed around the edges of the room, each one wearing an olive green jumpsuit. They looked young. Not in age, but in attitude. Some were eager, with wide smiles and a bounce in their step. Some were anxious, glancing around at the others, and back at him.
Colin Wallis watched it all from the small stage at the center of the amphitheater. He wasn’t standing on it. He was sitting on the edge of the stage, his feet resting on the stage’s rim. It was a more casual position, one that invited trust… but he used it more because it was honest. It reminded him that he was not important – and that the mission was all that mattered.
He waited for the last person to sit down, and the entrance door to shut, before he spoke.
“Welcome,” he said. “You all know who I am, and you know what you’re signing up for.”
He looked at each member of the audience in turn, taking a few moments to meet their eyes, and move on to the next person. It was an old leadership skill he had learned in the Protectorate, before he’d left it years ago.
“My name is Armsmaster,” Colin said. “Some of you already know me, and some of you don’t. I am not a Pilot, like all of you. I am not a great hero, no matter what anyone says. I’m a man with one goal, and I’m honored that you are willing to help me with that goal.”
Physically, all these Pilots were adults. This was not a gathering of Parahumans, so many of whom triggered young, in horrible ways. The selection method of a Suit was far less traumatic, and it was rare for a Pilot to be younger than the legal drinking age.
But in attitude? In mindset? Colin looked at them and thought of Vista, back when she was still short and bristling with the desire to be taken seriously. He thought of Clockblocker, goofing off and trying to lighten the mood.
These Pilots… most of them had never seen combat. All they knew was that they were a chosen elite, that they had been given a technological gift beyond anything else in the world.
“Here, we all work together,” Colin continued. “I will be alongside you the whole way. We will train you for the battles to come. If you want to get better at Piloting or fighting, a veteran will always be willing to help you in the sparring rings or the simulators. If you want to learn how to help maintain and repair your Suit, go the engineering bays, and ask around. If you want to know more about the threats you will face, and the good you will do, come to the Geoscape and ask.”
He hoped that they took the offer. Too many Pilots, like Parahumans before them, thought that they could coast by on their gift, and they didn’t bother putting in the work. His Faction was better than most, and many of the veterans would help the rookies learn… but Colin still wished that he had more time in the day, so that he could help each and every one of the rookies. So that he could be there when they asked for him, and help them when they struggled.
“If I am in the gym, the engineering bay, or the Geoscape, you can always talk to me,” he told them. “I will always help you. This is my commitment. I swear to you all that I will do my best to help you, so that together we can build a brighter future.”
The rookies sat a little straighter at that comment. They always did. They were here instead of joining the Wardens or the Robin Hood Brigade because they believed in his dream.
“The road will be long,” Colin said. “It will be hard. There are many in the world who want to drag us back to the old days. I believe that in order to help humanity, we have to keep advancing forward. But there is… one major obstacle to that. One person, above all others, who has caused more pain and suffering than anyone else alive.”
Eyes started to darken. Brows furrowed, not in confusion, but in anger. The crowd of a dozen people were only rookies, but they all knew who Colin was talking about, and they all hated the man already.
It wasn’t wrong of them to do so, but Colin still didn’t like to see it. It was too easy for rookies to lose themselves in righteous anger, and lose sight of the bigger picture.
“We will help everyone that we can,” Colin said, stressing that as he looked at them. “We will support Endbringer fights. We will aid the Guild in combating major threats. We will defend the Birdcage, and the common people. We will remember the good that we can do, the heroes that we can be – the example that we will live up to.”
Heads nodded. Some of the rookies exhaled, and let go of their rage.
“But…” Colin admitted, as their eyes focused on him. “When you join this Faction, you are agreeing to support the one objective that I hold most dear.”
He paused. Just for a moment, just long enough that they could all see his face – his real face, not hidden by mask or helmet, like in the old days. So that they could see the emotions that he didn’t try to conceal. The anger. The sorrow. The determination.
“We will bring Saint to justice,” Colin Wallis told them, his voice as firm as iron.
Colin walked through the hallway, nodding to the Pilots and support staff that crossed his path as he walked through Level 28.
The hallways of the base were large cylinders, held up by ringed bulkheads that showed exposed rock and concrete. They echoed lightly with bootsteps, and they were bare and utilitarian in appearance – which fit the military origin of the base itself.
Years ago, those walls would have been a decent metaphor for his personality. Old rock, ringed with new technology. Not bending or breaking, but not adapting, either. The hallways had been drilled or blasted through that rock. What remained to hold up the floors above them was not left behind because it was powerful or strong, but simply because it wasn’t in the way. The walls were strong and they served a purpose – but they were less important than the base around them. The rooms full of Pilots, engineers, doctors, soldiers, cooks. The people, so easily overlooked.
He walked up the last staircase to the operations room. The lights were set low and the room was a little colder than the rest of the base, as normal.
“Jeff,” Colin said, greeting the man sitting at the front computer.
“Boss,” Jeff answered, looking over his shoulder at him. “Done talking to the rookies?”
“Yeah,” Colin replied with a nod, as he walked up to Jeff’s side. “Is that coffee?”
“Sure is,” Jeff told him, reaching over for the carafe and pouring some of the steaming beverage into a second coffee cup. “Thought you might want some.”
“Thanks,” Colin said, taking the cup gratefully.
He sipped from the mug, and savored the taste. Jeff made the best coffee. He made the best anything, really.
After a moment to let the warmth spread through his body, Colin looked out from the operations room, and into the geoscape. It was a large cube-shaped room, much taller and broader than almost every other room in the underground base. The operations room was attached to one side, connected by a window so that the command staff could see it without dealing with the noise.
In the center of the geoscape was a large hologram emitter. It was a priceless piece of Dragon’s technology, maintained by Colin and Jeff, and it projected a spherical image of the Earth itself in full color. As it spun in the room, support staff manned the computers mounted all around it, constantly updating the projection with the latest information from around the globe.
They tracked Suit brawls, the term for any fight between different sets of powered armor. The bases of major Factions were also there, along with national borders, potential Endbringer targets, and plenty of other information.
Objectively speaking, the geoscape was an absolute marvel of technology. Many of the support staff loved to work on it, to see the vision of Dragon’s creation. The sheer size of it awed them, like living proof that technology could save the world. None of them knew that it was actually Colin and Jeff who’d configured the hologram emitter to project a globe, and made it that large in the first place.
“I still think it doesn’t need to be so big,” Colin remarked, sipping at his coffee. “Two meters in diameter, at most.”
“Four meters minimum, or I quit,” Jeff said, without looking up from his computer screen.
“It’s too big, and too high up,” Colin pointed out. “Most people can only see Antarctica, Australia, and the southern bits of Africa and South America. It’s useless for everywhere else in the world.”
“That’s why we have the ops room,” Jeff said, rapping his knuckle on his computer desk. “So that command staff can see it. Besides, the briefing room upstairs has the best view, which is kind of the whole point.”
“You do realize that I’m in charge around here, right?” Colin asked, checking for confirmation.
“Have you beaten UFO Defense yet?” Jeff countered.
“…No,” Colin admitted, begrudgingly.
“Then you don’t get to have an opinion on the vital necessity of my geoscape,” Jeff told him with a dismissive sniff.
“I don’t have time for it,” Colin protested. “I’ve got too much to do.”
Jeff stopped typing, and looked to Colin. His expression was gentle, but firm.
Colin sighed.
“Sorry,” he apologized. “I know. We made a deal.”
“We made a deal because you asked for help,” Jeff said, correcting him softly. “I’m happy that you’re talking to the rookies, and that you’re making yourself available all the time. It’s much better than what you were doing before. But you can’t just talk to people and think that’s good enough. You need to empathize with them. Watch the same sports, drink at the same bars, know what they care about, and why.”
“I know, I know,” Colin said, lowering his head slightly. “And you know that I could counter that UFO Defense is twenty years old, and there are much more recent and better games I could play.”
“More recent, yes,” Jeff said, sniffing the air as if he’d smelled a foul stench. “Better… no.”
Colin rolled his eyes, but he couldn’t keep a smile from slipping out.
“Anything I need to look at?” he asked, dropping the humor and gesturing to the geoscape.
“Nope,” Jeff said, matching his seriousness. “All quiet. No brawls in the last eight hours, and after the last big one over in Vegas, I don’t think we’re going to see another one soon. I’m on for another two hours, then it’ll be the night-shift. We’ll call you if anything comes up.”
“Thanks,” Colin said.
He hesitated. A part of him wanted to move on, to quickly walk away to the engineering bay and continue his rounds… but that would have been the same kind of thing that he’d used to do back in Brockton Bay, turning professionalism into an unhealthy distance from all his co-workers.
After a moment, he reached out, and put a hand on Jeff’s shoulder.
The young man looked up at the gesture.
“Thank you,” Colin said slowly, as he looked Jeff in the eyes. “Thank you for helping me. Not just today. From the beginning.”
“You’re a fuckin’ softie, boss,” Jeff said, a smile of his own appearing on his face. “That’s what she saw in you. I’m just… trying to make sure you remember it.”
Colin smiled, and then stepped back from the command desk.
He would have enjoyed staying to chat with Jeff, as they had become good friends over the last four years, but there was always more to do. His days were busier than ever, and his time for Tinkering was less than ever… but somehow, Colin was happier now.
The stairs clanked as he trod down them, heading down towards the engineering bays.
More people passed him in the hallway. Some of them, US Air Force personnel, saluted him on sight. He returned each salute politely, and kept moving. They’d get used to him soon enough. The men at the last base had. The others, both Pilots and support staff from his own organization, simply nodded.
The engineering bays were down a long corridor. It was a new addition to the underground mountain base, created by some of the more specialized Suits of power armor. They needed a lot of room, both for the entrance and exit tunnels, and for the storage of not only their Suits, but also all their maintenance infrastructure.
Colin waved his badge at the card-reader, and walked into a huge, cavernous space. The ceiling soared above him, nearly twenty meters up. It was held up by enormous pillars of steel and stone, sectioning the single cavern into multiple smaller ‘hangars’. Without additional Tinker technology, the weight of the mountain above would have collapsed the space. The walls were spread far apart, making it the least claustrophobic section of the base.
Dozens of Suits filled the engineering bays. Powered armor from all five weight classes were present: Mesh, Light, Medium, Heavy, and Fortress Suits, in their myriad forms and bizarre appearances. Some were humanoid, some were animalistic, some were alien, and some were fantastical – but they were all marvelous pieces of technology, the most advanced war-fighting machines ever created.
Sparks were flying from arc-welders, and cranes hauled. A crew chief was barking orders somewhere, and Pilots in their black undersuits were climbing into or out of their Suits, preparing for training exercises, patrols, and other duties. One of the exit tunnels was open at the moment. Even this deep underneath the Rocky Mountains, sunlight descended from the shaft, like a pillar of gold, illuminating the flaring engines of the powered armor that was about to take off.
Colin walked past a Medium-weight Hopper that was undergoing repairs for its digitigrade legs. They’d been damaged in a recent brawl with Saint’s Dragonslayers. That was the downside of having a Hopper: a little more fragility.
Each Suit of power armor was unique, but they all shared a common standard of capability, based on their weight class.
Mesh Suits were the cheapest, most agile, and the easiest to repair. They gave an average adult the ability to out-compete a peak human soldier. Tantalizing… but in comparison to other Suits, they were the weakest, slowest, and most fragile.
Light Suits were more expensive, slower, and harder to repair... but much stronger, faster, and more durable. Supersoldiers, the kind of things that video games had used in first person shooters for well over a decade.
Medium Suits were a good balance of everything. Flexibility, armor, power generation, ease of repair, speed, and strength - it was solid in every category that a Suit needed. The downside was size. A Medium Suit was closer to a vehicle than personal protection.
Heavy Suits were much less agile, and more difficult to repair, though still not as much as traditional Tinkertech. They made up for it with their excellent durability, power generation, top speed, and strength. Again, they grew larger. A Heavy Suit with treads was larger than an M1 Abrams tank, while a bipedal Heavy could stand eight meters tall.
Fortress Suits were, of course, the heaviest and slowest. They were barely easier to repair than Tinkertech, though it was possible. In return… you got exactly what it said. A walking fortress. They were dropships large enough to carry smaller Suits into battle. They were mobile bunkers, bristling with firepower. They were dragons, soaring through the air on fusion thrusters.
Colin walked around the engineering bays for some time, making sure to socialize not just with the Pilots, but with the maintainers that kept the power armor working. They were mostly ex-Air Force personnel, and they’d brought a military culture with them that Colin enjoyed.
Every Suit was a work of art, and the part of Colin’s brain that was his power – the Corona Gemma and Corona Pollentia – hummed in appreciation as he walked past the gorgeous machines.
Each and every one was Tinkertech, but it wasn’t normal. Not anymore. Normal Tinkertech couldn’t be repaired by anyone but the original maker, whereas the Suits could be. They had standardized weapons, sensors, reactors, and control mechanisms. Even the more exotic capabilities would pop up in dozens of Suits around the globe, instead of only once, as a rare super-prototype.
Mass produced Tinkertech. It had been a dream of so many Tinkers, governments, and militaries for decades. Colin knew – he’d been one of them, working for the Protectorate for so long. Now, it was a reality.
Four years ago, there had been a seismic shift in the power balance of the world, with the revelation and distribution of the Suits.
Many, Colin included, saw it as a source of optimism, a reason to look up at the stars and hope for a new, brighter future.
Others saw it as only a source of violence: the beginning of the Armor Wars.
It wasn’t a new concept. In many ways, it was just the final failure of the Protectorate. They had tried for decades to convince the public to see parahumans as heroes from comic books, sensationalizing their powers and abilities as real life magic, beyond human understanding.
Colin still believed that the Protectorate had done a lot of good in those years…
…but the magic was gone now. The curtain had lifted. Now, the public was no longer listening to the propaganda. They knew that the end of the world was coming.
Desperation turned to bargaining, and then into begging.
Save us, people cried out – and they aimed those cries at Colin… and at Saint.
He finished up his tour through the engineering bays after about an hour.
In the past, he would have loved to spend an entire day in those hangars, fine-tuning machinery and chatting with his closest friend in the world. He was still a Tinker, and whenever he looked at those Suits of power armor, he got the urge to improve them, to tear them apart, to create and modify and optimize.
But those days were gone, along with his closest friend. He was a leader. He had responsibilities. He had shirked those duties before, both because he hadn’t cared enough, and worse, because he’d been afraid of his lacking leadership capabilities.
Colin had led the Protectorate East-North-East for years, but when the city was condemned, only a single person followed him on his mission: Chris, the boy that he had failed the most, not only as a leader, but as a mentor for the boy’s own Tinker abilities.
The beeping of Colin’s watch alarm interrupted their conversation. Colin glanced it, pursing his lips.
“Go on, go on!” Chris laughed, patting him on the shoulder. The ‘boy’ had grown up, and now he was a man of twenty years.
“I don’t mean to cut this short,” Colin said, apologetically.
“I know, sir,” Chris said, smiling at him. “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna take offense. Besides, if you don’t get the hell out of here, then Jeff’s gonna come chew both of us out, and I don’t want that.”
Colin returned a smile of his own, and politely excused himself.
The walk back to his quarters was quieter. The night shift was about to start, and it was the perfect time for Colin’s own wind-down towards a proper eight hours of sleep. He’d flirted with polyphasic sleep, but at the end of the day, that had been another excuse to not take care of himself, to treat his body like he was nothing but a machine.
He took one of the base elevators up to Level 26, his head buzzing with leftover thoughts from his inspections and consultations on the Suits of power armor. He was too keyed up, and that’s why he had the alarm – to give himself time to relax, to slowly cool his brain down, before he went to bed.
A light switch clicked as he flipped it on, shutting the door to his quarters behind him.
The computer started booting up as Colin emptied out his pockets and kicked off his shoes. The room might have been identical to all the other senior officer’s quarters in the Mountain, as inoffensively bland as a motel room, but he had added some personal touches. A home was more than four walls. It was what you filled it with.
A single hand reached up and traced along the edges of the halberd mounted alongside the wall. It was four years out of date, and the old Colin Wallis would have scrapped it for spare parts, re-used the bones to make a newer version, so that he could save a small amount of resources and money. But this halberd was special. This was the halberd he had used when he’d left the Protectorate, the same one that he had fought Leviathan with. It had meaning to him beyond just the metal and wires.
Colin sat down in front of his computer, and paged idly through the desktop. He didn’t want to do any more work, but his mind was too active to fall asleep now. That meant he wasn’t going to read any of the daily reports, or check out the latest chatter from Factions across the world. Perhaps he might have copied some of the younger generation and aimlessly browsed the internet, but this was a secure network, so it didn’t actually have an internet connection, just a local intra-net.
There was, however, one thing that he could look at. It was technically work, but it was more of a personal project than anything immediate.
He clicked through his folders until he came to a file simply labeled: ‘The List’.
Rows and rows of data sprang to life on the monitor in front of him. Numbers. Callsigns. Origin. Dates. Status. Attached audio files.
There were hundreds of them. Thousands. More than most people would have imagined.
This was the culmination of four years of interviews. It was a list of every new Pilot and their individual Dragonsuit, sorted chronologically by their Suit’s first appearance.
He had no new entry to add, so he started scrolling up. The rows had some color-coding – dividing lines between heroic Pilots and criminal ones. He rarely ever got to interview the criminals, but he could still collect data on them, and fit them into the list’s information.
For anyone else, this list wasn’t anything important. There were similar lists like these, held in places like the Pentagon, the Kremlin, the headquarters of major Dragonsuit Factions, things like that.
But for Colin, this was a… personal mission. Something that he cared deeply about. Plenty of Pilots knew about his list, and some even knew the reason why he wanted to interview every single Pilot that he could.
The higher he scrolled on the list, the more rows became red, signifying a dead Pilot. So many dead. It hurt him to think about – each dead Pilot was a loss not just of a human life, but of a chance to understand Dragon’s technology. A chance to learn what secret she had discovered, to mass produce the Suits that everyone now remembered her for.
He knew many of those dead Pilots. Some of them had fought alongside him, desperate to live up to Dragon’s last will. A precious few had truly understood the ways that Colin Wallis, the cape known as Armsmaster, was desperately trying to uphold her legacy.
How had Dragon created so many Suits? How had she standardized her technology without anyone noticing until she was gone? How had she cracked near limitless energy and stabilized normally uncontrollable technologies like nanites?
Most of the world knew that Colin had been close to Dragon, and many of them believed that he was their best chance at rediscovering her lost secrets.
But not all of them. To some, far too many, there was a competitor. A more ‘proven’ user of Dragon’s technology, by dint of his deeds.
Saint.
It wasn’t enough that Saint and the Dragonslayers had finally managed to kill Dragon and steal her technology. Saint was stealing her reputation, now – the very ideas that could save the world from countless dangers and evils. He had built up a criminal empire of Dragonsuit Pilots by leveraging his stolen technology to repair their Suits, binding them further and further into his fingers.
Four years since Saint had killed Dragon. Four years of mechanized warfare, simultaneously more destructive than the parahuman conflicts of the part, and somehow less. Higher lows, but lower highs, as it were.
Dragonsuits were not like parahumans. They needed logistical support, and the grinding attrition of brawls had steadily forced almost every Pilot into a Faction.
Almost every single one… but not all.
Colin’s eyes traced the list of names, the endless rows of check-marks that indicated that he had interviewed each Pilot. As the scrolling slowed near the top of the list, there was one row that had no check-mark. A Pilot that he’d never had the chance to interview.
Number: 0001.
Callsign: ‘Wraith’.
Origin: Brockton Bay.
Date of first appearance: six hours after Dragon’s death.
Status: Independent.
Attached audio file: Unknown.