Sidekick: The Misadventures of the New Scarlet Knight Read online

  Great. I’d stepped in it this time. I only have a passing interest in things having to do with knights other than ones with high-tech, crime-fighting tools, and now I was dealing with someone who not only used an “e” on the end of the word “faire,” but actually pronounced it slightly, too.

  “Wow. That must be a lot of work for you.”

  “It is! But it’s a lot of fun too. We’re a little shorthanded at the Faire this year. I remembered your fascination and thought I’d ask you. Chance to pick up some extra cash and really enjoy yourself. What do you say? Want to help?”

  I grinned. “I’ll think about it, but the truth is, I don’t know how much time I’ll be able to spare when March rolls around.”

  “Oh? What’s up?”

  “I started a new part-time job.”

  ***

  As I arrived home with a knapsack overflowing with books, notebooks, and other educational paraphernalia, life finally felt normal for the first time in days. For a few minutes, at least, I was nothing special. Coming home after school was the feel of a breeze through my hair and the warmth of the sun on my back and an apple pie cooling on a windowsill on an autumn afternoon. It was so unremarkable that it was remarkable, and I loved it.

  I kicked off my sneakers by the door, dropped my knapsack next to them, and flopped on the living room couch like any other kid exhausted from school, determined to enjoy as much normal as I could while it lasted.

  The more my body relaxed, the more my mind raced, reviewing the abrupt changes in my life; I hadn’t realized how much of a routine I’d developed until that routine had been disrupted. The days I’d bunked off of school because of Uncle Jack’s death had taken on a bit of a surreal feeling, and now that they were over, I could truly appreciate how much I’d missed the humdrum routine they’d interrupted.

  Then, as I went into the kitchen to grab a soda, another thought entered my head—the routine I was celebrating was in itself a bit of a disruption of another routine. If I’d continued along the informal schedule this routine had imposed upon the day, I would take my drink back into the entrance hall, pick up my books, and head upstairs to do homework. After an hour or two hacking away at the academics, I would either watch TV or go work out in the mansion’s gym, depending on my mood. Then dinner and relaxation until exhaustion crept in enough to hit the sack so I could wake up and do it all again. A nice routine, pleasant in its boringness, but honestly, it wasn’t the routine I’d fallen into over the years.

  My pleasure at resuming my current routine made me think about the routine it had replaced, which made me wonder how it would feel to pick up that original routine again. Or, at least, as close to it as I could get after the events of the previous week.

  But I would never get that routine back, so instead of doubling back to the living room, I took my soda farther down the hall, through the hidden door behind the giant grandfather clock, and on down the winding stairs.

  Three days ago, after returning to it for the first time in months, the Scarlet Knight’s secret hideaway had seemed cold and empty. Now, it felt like the cavernous base was welcoming me back. The detritus of the impromptu birthday party was still strewn across the floor and a number of other surfaces, giving the base a much more lived-in look. I spent a half hour cleaning up pizza boxes and empty cans, then sweeping and dusting the room. Once it looked like everything was ready for action, it was time for action.

  Near the exit was the large cabinet Uncle Jack had jokingly referred to as “the wardrobe.” I pushed my hand against the sensor, and the cabinet door slid back, revealing that all-important tool of the modern crime-fighter: my costume.

  I reflexively reached for one of the Squire outfits, my muscle memory not having yet come to terms with my new identity. I took a deep breath and took one of the Scarlet Knight costumes off its hook.

  The main suit was made of a wonder fiber spun out of incredibly durable but obscenely lightweight metal. It was a souped-up version of the material that had been Uncle Jack’s first invention and had made him his first billion. At least a quarter of the clothes produced in the United States over the past decade had been made by Horner Textiles and carried a five-year guarantee against rips and tears. Of course, those clothes weren’t bulletproof like the Knight’s armor, but you can’t have everything, can you?

  I shucked off my street clothes and pulled on the suit, which proved a little tight. I hadn’t realized it, but over the previous couple of years I’d become slightly larger than Uncle Jack. The suit still fit, stretching just enough to match my frame, but now I had even more reason to exercise and stay in shape.

  Next I pulled on the boots, which had been specially built with anti-gravity units in the soles, allowing the wearer the power of flight and, if you were on the ground, the ability to move quicker than your body mass would normally let you. Uncle Jack probably could have made another couple of billion by adapting them the same way he’d adapted his suit’s fabric, but they were one invention he was reluctant to share. The Knight and the Squire were the only ones with these little babies. They were that special.

  A few minutes of reacquainting myself with the controls—a series of pressure-pads situated under the toes—had me floating around effortlessly. It was like riding a bicycle—once you learn it, you never quite forget.

  The breastplate went on next. It was a nifty device, both decorative and functional. It included a heck of a power supply, which fueled not only the helmet and its high-tech gizmos, but also a sort of climate-control unit. Depending upon the ambient temperature, it conducted either warmth or cold through the metallic fibers of the suit, keeping the wearer comfortable at all times. Uncle Jack had created special versions of the suit for more extreme conditions, but the breastplate unit was more than enough for the temperature swings of Harbor City.

  Finally, I pulled on the helmet, which fastened onto the breastplate with a solid thunk and beeped as its systems came online. A tiny fan whirred next to my ear as it interfaced with the temperature sensors in the breastplate. Amplifiers carefully placed near the ears provided more-than-acute hearing along with an interface to the police and emergency-responder radio frequencies. I flipped down the visor, which lit up with data from the scanner units mounted on top of the helmet. Once the ambient light dropped below a certain point, the same display would light up with night-vision, a nifty tool to say the least.

  Eye movement controlled the displays in the helmet; all you had to do was look at one of the command icons across the top of the visor for a half-second to change readouts, re-tune the helmet’s radio and scanner, or override the temperature controls in the breastplate. Uncle Jack had done a scaled-down version of the visor system for my Squire outfit’s domino mask, so I was familiar with the basics, but still slightly overwhelmed. There was so much the big helmet could do. I dedicated a few minutes to finding my way around the controls and familiarizing myself again.

  By the time the little clock display in the lower right hand corner of my visor clicked over to five o’clock, I figured I was as ready as I was going to be. I went back to the wardrobe for the last piece of the puzzle as far as the outfit was concerned. I needed a weapon.

  Uncle Jack had this really cool high-tech sword that was easy to swing in a fight but still delivered a heck of a blow. It was retractable and had an electro-shock device and some kind of sonic beam. I’d tried it out a couple of times. The sword was definitely the coolest part of the whole getup.

  Sadly, I didn’t have it. The sword hadn’t been on Uncle Jack when we’d gotten to his body, which made it safe to say it had been taken by whichever villain had killed him. I hadn’t taken the time to search the computer database for blueprints, but I’d bet money that there weren’t any. Not only had that sword been Uncle Jack’s pride and joy—not for sharing with anyone, even his sidekick—but it had been the piece he tinkered with the most. Odds are good there were no blueprints because the sword hadn’t been designed as much as sprung, full-formed from
Uncle Jack’s brain, and evolved over the years as he’d fiddled with its micro-circuitry.

  Still, it wasn’t a good idea to go out without some kind of weapon. I picked up the staff I’d used as the Squire, which is also retractable and has a stun-gun feature (although not as powerful as the sword’s), and fastened it to its belt, which I then strapped on. My first contribution to the Scarlet Knight’s costume ended up being a little bit of my old sidekick outfit, and I thought that was somehow appropriate.

  Suited, armed, and ready for action, I went over to the far wall of the base. A quick glance at the “door” icon that had appeared on my visor swung the huge airlock-style doors open, revealing a long tunnel slowly sloping upward. Two miles along, the tunnel abruptly ended at a well-disguised doorway atop one of the huge dunes that squared off Harbor City’s beach. I activated the boots and drifted down the tunnel as I rotated into the proper flying position: parallel to the ground, one arm out, head up and ready to guide you forward. Once I was oriented correctly, I threw open the anti-grav units and took off like a bat out of hell, barreling down the tunnel at ninety miles an hour. A minute later, much to the surprise of a couple of guys running metal detectors over the desolate beach, I burst through the top of the dune and soared skyward. I could have sworn I heard the scavengers cheering me on and applauding as I broke out into the air, but it may have just been my imagination.

  The feel of the wind rushing by as I shot out into a cool evening breeze out over the ocean was a sensation that was never surpassed, no matter how many times I did that maneuver and felt that wind. It was like licking God’s nine-volt battery. For those few minutes, I was truly one with the night, and the entire universe reached out to take me into its arms and cradle me and let me know it would never leave me again.

  I had no doubt that I belonged out there, in the skies over the city, keeping an eye out for trouble. At long last, I was home.

  A Never Ending Battle …

  On Friday night, after my atoms slammed together and the usual half-second of disorientation, I walked down the hall and lifted my palm to the door sensor. It scanned me and opened, allowing me into HQ’s nerve center. The lights had been dimmed to next to nothing, leaving the room lit only by the ambient light of the monitor screens. That only fit one of the other heroes’ personalities, so I knew who was sitting in the big chair before he spoke.

  “Good evening, Bobby. You’re an hour early.”

  “Good evening, Mister Mystery. You’re three days early.”

  Uncle Jack had explained the concept of monitor duty years before. The heroes took it in turns to sit in the big chair, or pace around the room as they saw fit, and keep an eye on the screens for situations that would be big enough to require deploying a group of (or in dire circumstances, all of) us. With seven heroes in the Justice Federation, that meant each of us pulled monitor duty one night a week, watching over the world for twelve hours while most people slept. Monitor duty had been vital in the early days of the Federation, to the point where at the start, the heroes monitored everything around the clock, but Uncle Jack and the other geniuses eventually developed automated alert systems to monitor most broadcast frequencies, police and fire bands, and even parts of the Internet. The automation does a good job spotting situations that would require one of us to sweep to the rescue, but no one wants to do away with the practice. For one thing, it gives us a break from our own beats; guarding your hometown all the time can get a bit monotonous, and, looking at the big scheme of things, can be refreshing. Also, when big emergencies go down, it’s helpful to have a living person acting as dispatcher.

  “I’ve been following up on some leads in a case I’m working on.” Mystery spoke without turning to face me, the screens keeping his rapt attention. “It looks like Vaporella has been putting together a large smuggling operation, and I’m trying to get some better visuals of her last known base. Headquarters has faster and better satellite linkups than I have back home.”

  “Makes sense to me. The faster Vaporella can be stopped from doing whatever she’s up to, the better.” I dropped my schoolbooks and helmet on the big meeting table. Then, and only then, did Mystery bother to turn around.

  “What are the books for?”

  “Homework,” I answered, trying very hard not to sound snarky but also not trying to be too deferential. I was supposed to be his equal now. Well, in theory. “I’ve got an English paper to finish and a Calculus exam on Monday.”

  Mystery glared at me. I’m not sure if he snorted or if my brain came up with a noise to match the look he was giving me. “I hope you don’t plan to do homework while you’re supposed to be watching the monitors. I’d hate to have a city blow up because you were trying to find the right metaphor.”

  “Don’t worry, I know better than that. I’m sitting in on Paragon’s monitor duty tomorrow night as well, hoping to pick up a few tips and techniques from him. I’m going to sleep in my room here after I get off duty, and I’ll do my homework in the morning.”

  He sighed—no kidding, he actually sighed—and spun the chair back around. After a few deep breaths, as if he was trying to control a simmering temper, he descended from his high horse once more. “Bobby, I don’t know if you’re aware of this. The vote to invite you to take on Jack’s name and identity wasn’t unanimous.”

  Well, screw you very much. Great load to drop on a guy right before his first night with a big responsibility. “I wasn’t aware, but I sort of suspected as much. I knew there would be a couple of you who thought I wasn’t up to the job. Never mind six years of on-the-job training and all the teaching Uncle Jack put me through before taking me out and everything I learned growing up as a—”

  “That’s not what I meant. All of us think you’re capable of doing the job. Your record as a sidekick more than illustrated that. What some of us questioned is if you’re ready for the job.”

  “I don’t see the difference.”

  “Being a hero is a big responsibility—”

  “You don’t have to tell me that!” I jumped in with my very best trying-not-to-yell-at-you voice. “I’ve lived with that responsibility ever since I first put on the tights, and—”

  “And you gave it up,” he interrupted with his very best I-don’t-need-to-yell-at-you voice, “when that responsibility became too much. You gave it up when it interfered with your education. That was the responsible thing to do, and I respected you for it, probably more than anyone else did. Was it wise to pick up that responsibility again so soon?”

  “I didn’t have much choice. Some have responsibility thrust upon ’em, to misquote Shakespeare. The six of you made it painfully clear when you invited me in that there wasn’t a real alternative.”

  “Of course there were alternatives, just not very appealing ones.”

  We fell silent. He returned his concentration to the monitor screens, and I tried unsuccessfully to turn mine away from the doubts our conversation had raised.

  “How do you manage it?”

  “Manage what, Bobby?”

  I walked up and stood beside him. Neither of us took our eyes off the screen ahead. “The responsibilities. The demands. How do you manage them? You’ve got civilian responsibilities that make mine look like a life of leisure. You’re a top-notch surgeon. You still do rounds! Hell, you even spent five years as Rick’s foster father, which I’m sure wasn’t easy. Yet, somehow you find the time to put on the costume and do arguably the best job of all of us at cleaning up your city. And to top it all off … ” I tapped a few keys on the console and zoomed the display in on one section that caught my eye before finishing my thought. “How do you manage to do it all? What’s the secret?”

  Mystery let out another weary sigh. Then he turned to me. “There is no secret. There’s nothing to manage. We don’t do it all. Some things will inevitably fall by the wayside, which is frustrating. The trick is to know what things are too important to be sidelined, and you focus on those.”

  “There she is!” I zoo
med the display even farther, focusing it on a shadowy figure. Mystery returned all of his attention to the screen, blissfully ending the lecture. I wasn’t sure what exactly he was expecting to see his nemesis doing, but the way he sprung into action told me he had seen it. He jumped out of the monitor chair and dashed to the far end of the room, programming coordinates into the teleporter. Years ago, we sidekicks shared a joke at Mystery’s expense, saying that if you watched him leave, that was his way of saying goodbye. More often than not, you’d turn around, and he’d be gone. But after he set his destination and was ready to ’port out, he turned his attention back to me.

  “Bobby, I want to say this again: you are capable of the job. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you aren’t. But also remember to prioritize. There may come a time when the right thing for you to do is walk away again. Don’t be afraid, or ashamed, to do that if it’s the right thing to do.” With that, he took his own advice and activated the teleporter, leaving me alone in the half-dark room.

  ***

  Monitor duty was quiet; I didn’t see anything that required intervention, although I was tempted to foil a break-in at an electronics factory. The cops got there before I could program the teleporter, which was a good thing. We’re supposed to do that sort of thing on our patrols and think about grand scale things when we’re in front of the big screen.

  Once the sun came up on the East Coast and my shift officially ended, I passed right out in my dorm room. The bed was unbelievably comfortable, and I slept like a baby for the first time in weeks. Come to think of it, for the first time since Uncle Jack died.

  I woke up and decided to take advantage of one of the nicer features HQ offered—its gym. In our line of work, one needs to stay in the absolute best shape possible, and that means state-of-the-art equipment to keep us fit. Even the sidekicks were invited to use the gym, with supervision. (The supervision catch was put in place after Tommy, who sometimes had a problem controlling his speed, burned out every treadmill in the place.)