Tales of the Red Panda: The Android Assassins by Gregg Taylor Page A

the red fire in its eyes now quite
extinguished. It was nearly complete, but for the absence of its right leg
below the knee and one of its electric-whip appendages, which was a charred
mess. She peered at it skeptically.
    “Not bad, don't you think?” the Red Panda asked
absent-mindedly as he poked about.
    “All bad if you ask me,” Kit grumbled.
    He looked up, surprised. “Yes, I see your point,” he said,
not looking at the towel she wore like a turban. “Still, nice to have some
physical evidence to work with. Wish we could have figured a way to get more
than one,” he clucked slightly, “but still, the police will have more, and I
ought to be able to get the details for comparison purposes.”
    She pulled the towel from her head and began to dry her hair
as she talked. “This doesn't seem weird to you at all, Boss?”
    He glanced over, quickly decided that she did not mean her
hair, and forced his eyes back to the prone robot. “What do you mean?” he
asked.
    She sighed. He was in full mad-scientist mode and couldn't
see the forest for the trees. “First we had no physical evidence at all, on
account of it blowing itself to kingdom come to try an' kill us. And now we're
sorry that we only came back with one complete metal man. That sound goofy to you?”
    He put down his instruments, raised himself to his full
height and folded his hands upon the workbench. She had his attention.
    Kit felt her cheeks grow hot and tried not to imagine that
she had been called upon to recite at school. “Okay,” she said, “last time around
Captain Clockwork robbed the city blind before you figured out that his
mechanical men were just puppets, that they were getting their orders from a
radio signal. Once we blocked the signal, his toys stopped in their tracks.”
    “Right,” the Red Panda said, waiting for the other shoe to
drop.
    “And the Captain had the brains to do what supervillians never do. He threw in the towel and went to
ground. Gave us nothing to work with and disappeared for months and months.”
Kit was assembling her train of thought as she spoke, but she sensed no
impatience from her mentor. He was just watching and listening. “So now he's
back,” she continued, “and he must have fixed the problem, or he wouldn't have
come back, right? But for lack of options, we try the same
thing , block the signal . Except this time the
tin men hone in on the source of the counter-signal, in this case being you
standing there flat-footed–”
    He coughed his displeasure but said nothing. Kit continued
with new momentum, “And they do their very best to blow you to Hades by turning
themselves into marching bombs.” Kit locked eyes with him across the table. She
was on to something and they both knew it. “So tonight, we set up relay
stations all over the battle zone to try and blanket the whole area with the counter-signal
so they can't tell where it's coming from–”
    “And they all fall over like they've fainted,” he said,
finishing her thought. “It was too easy, wasn't it?”
    “Boss,” she said, “if they were still getting orders from a
signal we could monkey with, Clockwork never would have sent them back out.”
She pointed to the thing on the slab. “That is a trap.”
    He raised an eyebrow. “I was with you for a while, Kit, but
that's a bit of a leap,” he said. “This sorry chap is depowered, no explosives,
not emitting a signal of any kind.”
    “I still know a trap when I smell one,” she said, her eyes
narrowing.
    “So you're suggesting that we only recovered this unit
because our foe wanted us to do so?” the Red Panda asked, intrigued by the
thought in spite of himself.
    “I don't know what Crazy Joe wants, exactly,” the Squirrel
replied. “We got this one, and the cops have some more, and I reckon we've got
to try an' make some use of them. But I reserve the right to say I told you so,
is all.”
    “That's tough, but fair,” he grinned and turned back to the
table. All