Jaclyn’s idea solved the problem at the expense of letting Magnus know that we were there, but maybe we could devise a way to make it less obvious.

I asked “Is there any way we can make it look like it wasn’t us? I feel like we have to minimize their exposure to Artificer tech. A beam from our main gun, while we’re cloaked, would strongly suggest us, but they wouldn’t know for sure. Ghost could be invisible the whole time. Accelerando could move too quickly to see… Maybe both of you could also change your uniforms to something else? If they somehow caught a glimpse of you, it might confuse them at least.”

Jaclyn grinned, “Remember Derecho? The supervillain? I think she’s white, but she’s a speedster and if I use her colors and hide enough of my face, it might work. She’s even worked with the Nine. I don’t mind the idea of getting her in trouble.”

When I looked over at Rachel, I found her frowning. When she looked up, she said, “I don’t think there’s an invisible, phase-shifting supervillain with my build, but remember Blink? She’s a short-distance teleporter. I might be able to pull that off. She’s even worked with Derecho before.”

Jaclyn pursed her lips and said, “I think we can work around using the main gun. Have Ghost and me carry boombots with us. When we get into the ships, the boombots blow up the fusion drives and we take or destroy the Artificer and Abominator tech. If Ghost or I can’t destroy it, Cap does. There are a million supervillains with big guns. She just needs to choose one.”

“Are there any that have worked with Derecho or Blink?” I asked.

Next to me, Cassie rolled her eyes, “We’ve got three hours. We’ll figure it out, but you know what? I bet you and Shift could find a stretchy guy and power armor villain that you can fake. Then we can bring everybody in.”

“Oh, right.” Still watching the spaceships ahead of us, I started trying to think about who I could successfully impersonate.

For the record, a three-hour spaceflight goes much more quickly when you’re making up a plan for how you’re going to incapacitate two spacecraft and steal dangerous alien artifacts from a hive of scum and villainy without losing your lives in the process.

Throw in extra points for maybe starting a civil war in the supervillain organization you’re fighting and it gets even better.

By the end of the flight, Marcus and I were “Clink” and “Clank,” a duo of mercenary, power armor wearing inventors. They’d done work for the Nine, random supervillains, a few warlords, and several dictators. From what I’d read, they were also fans enough of National Public Radio’s Car Talk show that they’d ripped off and altered the hosts’ names.

The hosts, from what I’d read, weren’t fans of that.

Clink and Clank sometimes worked with “Burner,” another mercenary who used a futuristic energy weapon on her victims.

None of them had ever worked with Blink or Derecho, but it wasn’t a huge stretch that someone might hire them together. Plus, realistically, they’d probably figure out it was us if they had time to investigate. If they didn’t have time or resources to spare for solving crimes, the ambiguity might last long enough to do us good.

That was good because we wouldn’t be perfect replicas—only as perfect as I could tweak the group’s nanotech-based suits to match. For that, Rachel’s art major was her real superpower. With her eye, we got more details on their costumes correct than I’d have managed alone even if Cassie’s gun found Rachel’s stream of suggested tweaks to its look annoying.

“He doesn’t like his new look,” Cassie said as we neared reentry. “Mr. Sparkles thinks Burner’s gun is primitive and inelegant except he took much longer to say so than I did. Honestly, I think he’s embarrassed.”

I checked out the gun. It did look chunky—lots of rectangular blocks stuck together into a shape that overall suggested a rifle. It might also have been for spraying paint.

As Rook’s ships burned their way into the atmosphere, I checked our systems. The shield should absorb enough of the energy that we wouldn’t be too obvious and cloaking would theoretically take care of the rest.

I let out a breath as we started, but it went okay. If someone were watching, they would have detected a temperature change and a shimmer in the air, but not much of one. More to the point, not enough of one to attract attention if you were concentrating on something else—like reentry, for example.

That opened up a new question. Where was Rook going to land?

At first, all I could tell was that it was most likely Earth’s Western Hemisphere, but then Rook’s ships dove toward the Caribbean Sea.

For a second, I worried that we might be heading for an underwater base which would make our plan more complicated, but then they didn’t.

When they leveled out, they were flying low above the ocean, throwing up water behind them. If they were trying to evade radar, I could only hope our cloak held up because I wasn’t going to copy them.

Either way, it became obvious where we were going soon enough. An island appeared ahead of us. Covered in palm trees and lush greenery, I could imagine it being listed in a supervillain real estate guide under “tropical island lairs.”

The long, white building complex included towers, pillars, walls around the edges and an airport (spaceport?) with several long runways. The tall mountain in the middle of the island was a nice touch.

An international supervillain group like the Nine should have its headquarters on a tropical island with a volcano.