Felicia Hardy: The Black Cat #2
First Strike
The Black Cat has accepted a job from the Morelle Chemical Company to eliminate a copy of their chimera project that was stolen by their rivals, Cobalt Chemicals. While trying to wipe out the records on a private yacht, she is interrupted by Cobalt's super-operative, Faze and his Mechabytes. Although the mechanical bugs are easily destroyed by the Cat, Faze is harder to stop thanks to his ability to make parts of his body intangible. When he tries to figure out what she is doing to the computers, the Black Cat gets in the way in order to prevent Fazer from ejecting the disc from the computer. She explains that she has implanted a virus into the computer that has also set off the ship's self-destruct system. When Faze demands to know the override password, she ejects the disc causing the self-destruct sequence to begin. Unsure if the upper limits of his powers Faze decides to flee the scene in order to save himself. He plays into Felicia's bluff as she quickly activates the override.
Faze returns to the helicopter and is joined by the pilot. He tells the pilot to take him to Morelle Chemicals so he can steal the plans for chimera there. However, the "pilot" turns out to be the Black Cat in disguise. She grabs his briefcase full of Mechabytes and kicks him out of the chopper into the water below. As she heads back toward the mainland, she wonders why the computer disc collected data on something called Project: First Strike, as she was sent to retrieve the stolen data on the chimera. Not sure who she can trust, she decides to look up an old colleague of her father, a man named Loop. The following morning she gets a private visit with Loop at the Parkgreen Correctional Facility using forged documentation that lists her as Loop's wife. That evening, Felicia returns as the Black Cat and slips past the minimum security prison's defenses so she can pass the data disc to pull any relevant data out of it. After handing off the disc, she tells him that she will come back for the data later and swings off.
While at another prison, doctors continue their observations on a prisoner named Brian Lash. After checking on some anomalous readings on his charts they figure he will remain comatose for the rest of his sentence. However, as soon as they are gone, Lash suddenly wakes up, ambushing the guard in his room. He kills the guard and steals his uniform, giving him a means of ambushing other guards as he breaks out of custody. Back in Manhattan, Felicia Hardy invites herself to dinner with Paul Proust. When they sit down at a fancy restaurant. She confronts him with the fact that he is not telling her everything about chimera and he decides that they should finish this conversation at his place. There, Paul pours her some drinks and offers to show her the hard copy of the chimera file in order to gain her trust. However, Felicia doesn't totally trust Paul and so she scratches him behind the neck with a drugged fingernail so she can look at the computer files.[1] Unable to get at the files due to a password, Felicia decides to go to Morelle Chemicals in person.
Changing into the Black Cat, Felicia breaches the outer security of the Morelle building. Once inside, she slips past more of the security systems. Soon she finds herself in a lab where experiments are being conducted. There she is spotted by security guards but easily dispatches them. Finding a vault door, the Black Cat blows it open to see what is inside. There she finds a secret lab where human test subjects are in held in stasis cylinders. These people have been turned into cyborgs, leaving the Cat to wonder if these test subjects volunteered for these projects. Suddenly, the cylinders open and the cyborgs spring to life. They attack the Black Cat, but although she tries to fight back the cyborgs have self-repair systems. That's when Cardiac enters the room and tells her that these cyborgs are indestructible unless they broken down at a molecular level.
Recurring Characters
Black Cat, Loop, Paul Proust, Faze, Cardiac, Brain Lash
Continuity Notes
Felicia Hardy access Morelle's files using a dial-up modem to connect the two computers. This should be considered a topical reference per the Sliding Timescale of Earth-616.
