“So,” he says as he pops open a Coke, “what went wrong?” He gestures to the screens showing my fight with White Rhino.
“I made one weapon and thought it would cover every eventuality. It didn’t.” I say with a sigh. I need another weapon on the suit, but how do I get past the power requirements? I can maybe add one more power cell, making the total three, but even then I don’t know if it will be enough to mount another system. As it is I have about four hours of light activity, two of moderate, and thirty minutes of sustained combat. Adding the extra cell would only give me maybe twenty percent to those figures. Assuming I can even figure out how to add it.
“Amelia, take a break, the suit isn’t going anywhere.” He turns on the Xbox and fires up our favorite game, “Besides, I need some payback for the other night.”
I let out an exaggerated sigh. He’s right, the armor isn’t going anywhere and trying to fix things on a tired, beat-up brain isn’t going to help.
“Oh come on, Carlos, you think you can take me? Pshh, not on your best day could you ever come close to me on my worst day.”
“It’s on girl. It’s on like Donkey Kong.”
I push my wheels over next to him and pick up my own controller. I have a custom one with my name on it, as does he. The game is exciting and before I know it I lose myself in our verbal sparring.
“No wonder you lost your fight, you can’t hit for crap,” he jostles me in the shoulder.
Then I headshot him. He goes still for a second before he mutters dammit. I will give him this; in our mixed culture down here guys do not take well to losing to girls, especially macho guys. Carlos though, he lets it roll off him like water off a duck’s back.
“Okay, niña, round two.”
I envy him. My mom was a first generation immigrant from Columbia. She and dad met while they were in school and they hit it off. However, I never really learned her culture or language before…
Carlos blasts me and my avatar goes flying. The game spins around in the death slow motion showing my rise and fall in perfect detail.
While we’re waiting for the next match to load he leans back, “Your super Tasers didn’t work against him, huh? Too bad you can’t shoot him with a rocket or something. Of course, he’s built like a tank so that probably wouldn’t help.”
I close my eyes and try not to sound too sarcastic, “You think?”
“He’s not like you though, right? I mean he has to punch you or throw something at you… what if you could just,” he snaps his fingers, “make him float away?”
I slap myself in the face. I’m an idiot.
“Why didn’t you come over earlier?” I tell him.
“I have to time my moments of genius for maximum effect,” he says with a grin.
He isn’t wrong. I can build a grenade launcher and use my pods as a ranged weapon. I rub my hands together. It will take a little work, but I think it will be awesome.
3
The grenade launcher is pure genius. By collecting small amounts of my exhaust as I fly, I’m able to put a pod, or anything similar in weight and size, almost three hundred feet away. Now I can arm it with any combination of weapons. I had to add a few pieces of telemetry to Epic’s algorithms and now he can account for any weather condition when I’m firing. Not that Phoenix is ever anything other than hot and dry.
This high up my power cells recharge as fast as I expend them. I can also see the city of Phoenix laid out before me like a big gray lake nestled in between mountain ranges.
Carlos certainly wasn’t wrong. If it was money I wanted I could make a fortune selling all my tech. It’s not though. I want my parents back. I shuffle those thoughts away; they’re painful and I don’t want to deal with them right now.
“Epic, show me news and/or footage. Keywords ‘crime in progress,’ ‘powers,’ ‘Rhino,’ or ‘Vixen’.”
The list of searches scrolls by. Epic knows to filter out the useless garbage and also the things erroneously marked with today's date. Two windows pop up. One’s an amusement park and the other is a bank.
“Why an amusement park?” I ask my AI.
The possibilities pop on screen. It’s a long weekend, the parks will have a larger till than normal. The police response time would be slower as well. I think on it for a second. The other article is the police increasing bank security around National One, the largest bank in Phoenix. If I were Rhino, I would go for the park.
“Plot a course for the park,” I tell Epic. My faithful AI brings up a GPS overlay. At two hundred mph I can be there in under five minutes. I dial my thrusters up to max and bank for the west.
I can’t feel the air against my skin, but the suit buffets like mad, even with its friction-light coating. I feel the little plates on my shoulders and back shifting to compensate for air flow while the computer does its best to keep a non-aerodynamic form flying. With my arms out wide and slightly behind me, the two main flight stabilizing thrusters keep me level while the rest work to keep me pointed in the right direction.
When I first designed the suit, I had no idea getting the human form to fly would be this hard. It’s a wonder Supers like Protector and Aeon can do it with their powers, let alone go as fast as they do.
I have two unfulfilled goals with my suit: supersonic flight, and a really big gun. Something powerful enough I could punch through a battleship. I think I have the defense covered. Between the kinetic shielding and the alloy of the actual armor, I’m pretty sure I can survive anything. At least once I find a way to amp the shielding up. Probably not a nuke, but almost anything else. I’m pretty sure your average criminal doesn’t keep nuclear weapons lying around.
The map says I’m thirty seconds out when Epic pings me. Footage from YouTube pops up showing Rhino barreling through the main ticket stand at Enchanted Island while Vixen takes down the guards with her usual grace. The way those claws sparked off the suit, I can only imagine what they would do to flesh. I hope none of the guards are dead, but I can’t see how they wouldn’t be.
“Notify the cops and EMS,” I order him.
Affirmative.
Being late and having people die because of it puts my priorities in place. When I return to the workshop I’m going to find a way to increase my speed. Until then, I bring up all systems and charge my shields and weapons.
I hit the concrete with a ground shaking landing. Little spiderwebs run out from where my feet hit. The suit isn’t actually heavy enough to do anything like that. With my kinetic shields angled down, though, I can land with more force than my apparent mass. I’m going for awe factor here. I bring up both my arms with my palms out.
“Rhino, Vixen, STAND DOWN,” Epic makes my voice much more authoritative than it would otherwise be. It also broadcasts in fifty decibels. Not enough to damage hearing, but it gets their attention.
They laugh.
“You up for round two, tin-girl? Well then, get ready.”
Rhino’s thick New York accent is almost too much to understand. Him stomping his feet and scratching at the ground isn’t. They can’t see my smile through the smooth silver faceplate. Vixen continues loading cash into what looks like a backpack made for someone as tall and large as Rhino.
The ground shakes as the twelve-foot tall behemoth charges me. Each footfall shatters the concrete beneath his feet. It isn’t really his fault if I recall right. A government program to create super soldiers, running in a federal prison, did this to him. I don’t know if he was this messed up before, but he certainly is now. His skin is alabaster white and thick as a tank. His feet resemble telephone poles and his body is three times as wide as a normal human.
Epic calculates he’s moving at thirty-five mph. Perfect. The grenade launcher flips into place over my right shoulder. Targeting cross-hairs spring to life and overlay Rhino’s chest. He must think I’m scared stiff for not moving.
“Fire.”
There is hardly a noise as the pod flies through the air. The six-ounce piece of metal impacts hi
s chest an instant later. I’ve got it covered in a lightweight epoxy which explodes on contact, sticking to his chest. The light clicks on letting me know it’s active and suddenly Rhino lifts up.
I wave at him as he stares at me incredulously from twenty feet up. With no weight and only friction to stop him, Epic estimates he will go several miles before halting.
The park guests smartly stay back, but I hear gasps and mutters of glee as Rhino is removed from the equation.
I turn back to Vixen, expecting her to attack. Instead, she’s running.
“Thrusters. Charge IP cannons.”
The suit takes off and I direct it through the air. I can do a pretty good job at speed, where velocity can carry me through mistakes and I can push off the wind resistance. At low speed, the suit isn’t maneuverable at all. Vixen, on the other hand, is like a world-class gymnast who decided to take up parkour and juicing. I have one shot before she’s gone.
“Epic, full power cannons, proximity shot, fire when ready.” I lift both my arms and point my palms directly toward her. It’s hard to do while flying because it pulls my stabilizers offline and I have to sort of hover. Both cannons fire. The sound they make is somewhere between a battery discharging and sandpaper on wood.
I flip backward and my breakfast threatens to come up when I crash into the ground. The kinetic shielding reduces it to nothing more than if I had fallen while standing, but it shakes me up.
“What happened?” I ask groggily.
Epic shows me the math. At full power, while sustaining the most difficult form of flight, the energy from the cannons, which is usually nullified by my forward momentum or me standing on the earth, was enough to spin me in the air and then into the ground.
“Duly noted, no cannons while hovering.”
Yet another issue to deal with. If there were any way to have my hands free during flight, save having wings, I would do it. I don’t want wings. I did a design with them and it looked awful.
“Did we get her?” I ask as I pull myself up.
Unknown.
I resist the urge to dust off the suit. I pull up the full sensor suite and scan for Vixen. I annihilated the fence she was leaping over, but I missed her. Great.
“Epic, are paramedics inbound?”
Affirmative.
I hope they’re in time but there isn’t anything I can do. I ignite my thrusters and head off in the direction of White Rhino.
He’s easy enough to find. The pod carried him up a thousand feet and nearly two miles away. Air currents must have grabbed him at some point. It’s good to know. If I forget to collect someone with these, they would eventually suffer from hypoxia and die. I make a mental note to add ATC access to Epic. That should cover weather and air traffic. I’d hate for a 737 to crash into something I’d podded.
He’s spitting mad when I get to him. I picked up some rope on my way and lasso his foot, then I tie it to my waist and ignite my thrusters. He has no weight, but boy, he has wind resistance. Flying while towing him is all but impossible. The problem is the local police can’t handle him. I have to drop him off at the Buckeye State Prison, almost thirty miles away. To make matters worse, I can’t slow down without him crashing into me. It’s going to be a long trip.
He curses at me the whole way. When he starts describing how he is going to violate me I turn off my external feed. Intellectually I know he can’t, but the emotional person inside of me doesn’t. I hadn’t thought about the consequences of catching criminals. What they would do and say when they were caught, or if they ever got out. All the reason to never, ever, tell anyone it’s me.
I’m breathing heavily from the exertion when I pull us to a stop over the Buckeye yard. Their alarms are blaring and I see AA cannons popping up from hidden turrets. I can’t imagine they receive a lot of flying guests who aren’t here to break someone out. I hold up my hands and ignore the alarms on my screen showing targeting vectors. Suit sensors pick up scattered radar and infrared beams trying to lock onto me. Good luck with that. If they do fire, I’ll just pull the pod on Rhino and fly off.
They don’t fire. On the tower nearest me a door opens. A Hispanic man in his fifties dressed in a nice suit steps out. He is all smiles as he walks to the railing closest to me. He reminds me of my father a little bit, and the beating my heart has already taken today increases a little more.
Epic’s automated process does facial recognition on him through the Internet. His picture, along with a complete bio, pops up. My pre-programmed algorithms put him at a trust level of over seventy percent based on all available data.
“Hello,” he says politely.
I decide to take a leap of faith and shakily maneuver next to him and land. Well, fall less than gracefully. I almost make it without going to a knee. When I recover I catch myself smiling at him. He has an infectious smile and I find myself returning it even though he can’t see my face.
Epic modulates my voice when I speak; I sound nothing like me.
“Warden, I’m sure you know who this is. Do you have a facility I can put him in?”
“We do… I’m not sure who you are, though?” he asks.
I ignore the question; I don’t have a name yet and I’m terrible at coming up with them. Whenever Carlos and I play an RPG I take forever to come up with a name that doesn’t sound stupid. The last game we played I settled for ‘Wheels McShooter.’ Yeah, I am that bad at it.
“Can you take charge of the prisoner?”
Listen to me speaking all cop talk. He smiles at me again. Even in the armor I’m not imposing. End to end I’m five-six. The armor adds two inches, bringing me to a whopping five-eight. My under-suit is form-fitting, it has to be, but the armor is bulked up in areas to give me more protection. I end up looking a little bulky more than svelte. I can’t help it, components take up space. I can’t have a one-nano-meter thick armor and have anything in it. I need inches.
“Okay, play it coy if you like, but I’m trying to help. The DMHA is going to come calling and what I tell them can either hurt you or help you,” he says.
I’m not the only armored person flying around. There are at least a half-dozen heroes and villains who use armor. Most of them have superpowers of some kind. I’ve researched them all. However, you don’t have to have superpowers to fall under the domain of the Department of Metahuman Affairs.
“Tell them I’m not a meta-human,” I say, trying to sound more confident than I really am. The DMHA is the one group I don’t want to tangle with yet. If they don’t think I have powers it may buy me a little time.
“Okay, if that is how you want to play it,” he sighs.. “Drop Rhino over there,” he points at a pit opening up.
By now Rhino had calmed enough to handle. He still gives me the death gaze as I pull the pod. He falls thirty feet down into the hole.
Once I know he’s secure, I wave at the warden and activate full thrusters. I watch the prison shrink behind me on my HUD.
“Okay, Epic, plot a course for home. Can you order a pizza from Bianco’s?”
It is Friday.
“Right, okay, well… pick one of the others I like. I need a little me time and some Star Trek.”
Affirmative.
4
I glance at the UHD TV I keep on the far wall. Rhino is being moved to the North Dakota UltraMax today. It’s the only long-term facility capable of handling him. Apparently, he has stamina enough to slam his head against the wall over and over for several days. Even the strongest concrete would give after a while. I’m not too worried about it because the Diamondbacks, Arizona’s premier super team, are on hand. I don’t have any sound on, which is good. I need to focus.
I still don’t have a solution for my flight stability problem, but I think I came up with another weapon. My kinetic shields absorb energy and then dissipate it from my suit’s vents. Essentially, it ends up being converted to heat energy and then wasted. I can use it to power something else. I’ll still lose about thirty percent in the conversion
when it is all said and done, but I will have one more weapon to add to my arsenal.
I can fire the kinetic force beam from my head by adding an emitter. It’s easy enough and it is what I’m delicately doing now. It’s a perfect weapon, not unlike my grenade launcher. Completely powered by absorbing energy directed against me. The only downside is if I want to do more than a strong shove, I need to be hit hard. I put the last piece into place and carefully solder the line. I’m working at a magnification strong enough to see nanometers. Even the slightest movement could hurt the process. I hold my breath until the computer gives me the okay.
I put the helmet back on the field, which holds it in place. Epic runs a diagnostics, and it is time to take a break. I’m sweating hard enough I need a shower. I run a comb through my shoulder length black hair. It used to be longer, but anything past my shoulders doesn’t fit in the helmet. The armor has to be as snug as humanly possible or I could be seriously hurt by even a minor shift in velocity.
Thirty minutes later I finish drying off and I’m back in my chair. I feel ten times better.
The TV flashes a Parker alert the code they use when telling civilians to be careful of superhuman activity. I don’t have to read it to know what it will say. Someone is trying to break Rhino out of jail.
I grab my synth suit and pull it on. It’s a struggle while sitting in the chair. Normally I would lay in bed, but I don’t have the time. The black material covers me like a glove and allows me to interface with the neural links in the suit. It’s what allows the armor to respond to my nerve impulses. I move like normal and the armor responds with the same amount of speed as if it were my own limbs. It’s also how I walk even though I’m paralyzed from the waist down. Essentially, the suit acts as an external nervous system, bypassing the damaged ones in my lower back and converting the signal to the motors and gears that synthesize muscles in the suits armored legs. Being an engineer and not a biologist, it is the best I could do.
Full Metal Superhero Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 2
