Super Thieves

Heather

"I had it all under control, Andrew," I snapped at him as we reentered the hotel room. I threw my mask onto the bed and took the battery piece we had stolen out of my bag. The second one was still sitting on the table where I had left it.

"I've told you since day one that we don't do runs when heroes are involved!" he shouted.

"Keep it up and you'll wake up the whole damn hotel," Carter laughed, walking past the two of us and unloading his bag onto the table.

The two of us halted our argument for the time being and I sat down with Carter to go over what we had grabbed. He'd managed to grab a lot of notes and what looked like reports, as if they were conducting a research project. Everything was in bits and pieces like back in Tokyo. The NSL is deliberately trying to cover up what happened. Hopefully we can merge what we found here with everything else, maybe then the rest of the story will make sense.

"What'd you find?" I said quietly as I skimmed through what Carter recovered.

"The words 'battery', 'Power Woman', and 'war' appeared on the same page several times. So I grabbed everything I could that had to do with Power Woman," Carter replied with a deep chuckle. He grabbed the second battery and started comparing it with the first.

"The second battery is almost identical to the first one," I mumbled as I read, "the only real difference are the serial numbers."

The notes were skewed as if they had to be read in a proper order. From what I could piece together, Power Woman was the leader of the NSL during the Hero Villain War. She ordered the construction and closing of the weapons base and that seems to be all that these set of documents has on the battery.

"The NSL must really not want people to find out what happened if they're making it this hard to read a simple history report," Andrew said. He started flipping through the pages I had already finished with.

"I'm sure I can draw some connections once I start to compare stories. There's a pattern to their skewing of information, it's just hard to see," Carter replied.

Power Woman doesn't lead the NSL anymore. In fact, she was proclaimed MIA about three years ago. That oddly lines up with the time frame of Black Ice's first serious acts of villainy. I have a strong suspicion that it's no coincidence she went missing.

"What's our next move?" I said as I set down the stack of papers I'd finished.

"It'll take me some time to get through all of this and find the next location," Carter replied.

"It would go a lot faster if we went to the NSL," I chuckled, looking Andrew dead in the face.

"We are not working with the NSL. They'll lock us up the second we set foot in their headquarters," Andrew said with a furious shake of his head.

"Would you rather fight them and Black Ice? Listen, we don't have to be their best friends but they're better to have as allies," I protested.

"There's no way. We can do this on our own."

"No, Andrew, we can't. We're damn good thieves but sooner or later our luck will run out. We need the NSL and you know that."

He was quiet. He knows I'm right. We can't fight the NSL. We can trap them in boxes and make quick getaways until the end of time, but when they and Black Ice are both hunting for objects we are racing to collect...we don't stand a chance. They're trying to be subtle for now. But at some point they'll get desperate and just start sending teams of superheroes to retrieve the objects.

"I agree with Heather. The three of us can't handle this on our own. The NSL would make good temporary allies," Carter said shyly.

"And what do we do when they attack us?" Andrew snapped back.

"Why would they do that? They don't know who the Shadow Broker, or Two Penny, or Indigo are. They don't even know what powers they have. To them we'll be nothing but a trio of amazing thieves," I laughed, "they need us just as much as we need them. They wouldn't dare try and arrest us until after we've stopped Black Ice."

Of course I will have contingency plans in place. We can't trust the NSL, not fully. They shouldn't have access to the Quantum Battery anyways. Looks like a couple pieces are going to have to go "missing" after this is over.

"Fine. But if this goes wrong I'm blaming you, Heather."

Andrew was going to give in eventually, I'm just glad he did it now and saved me the energy.

"I'm going to see what I can dig up on Black Ice," I said as I got up and walked into my work room.

I disconnected the wifi and booted up my server, logging on and setting up firewalls to protect our location. If anyone suddenly tries to start a hacker attack I'll be logged off in a literal three seconds. My safeguards are the most effective viral protectors in the world, it's a shame nobody else knows who to use them.

There wasn't much to find. Black Ice has surprisingly kept his whereabouts hidden. Except for the occasional news headline, it was pretty bare. I'm sure he's paying people to monitor the black market and dark web to keep him hidden. It's a hard thing to do but not impossible. Although, Black Ice has recently come into possession of an old nuclear reactor. Public records, and a few private ones, show a Robert Victor transferring large sums of money to large corporations. After a little more digging and some gluing together, I know exactly what happened.

After the weapons base was abandoned, it was taken over by one of many large electrical corporations. Robert Victor, Black Ice's secret identity, then came into ownership of a mysterious nuclear facility.

One that was built during the Hero Villain War.

His ownership became official three months after Power Women had been declared MIA.

Coincidence much?