1999: A Superhero Novel

by Hodden, TE

December 1999

  In the wake of the Legion Invasion many

  Nations have agreed to President Allistaire’s

  Broadsword Global Defence Programme.

  *

  A Senate Committee has been presented proof

  That the Honour Guard were in league with the

  Legion. Law enforcement agencies around the globe

  Hunt for the fugitives.

  *

  In Tokyo, Catherine Williams and Barney Mitchell are

  Tracing the origins of the cyborg cockroach.

  *

  In New York State, a visitor arrives at the Blackwell

  Secure Storage Facility…

  00000

  There was an uncomfortable silence in the back of the limousine, as it drove down the lonely forest road.

  Echo sat in one corner, wearing a paper thin, pleasant smile, borrowed from Elois.

  Opposite her, Zero Vector was curled up, as deep in the corner as she could get, as far from Nightmare as the seat would allow. She was trying to concentrate on the laptop computer she was jacked into, not to look at the way he was watching her.

  Nightmare sat beside Echo. There was something about the way he wore Harris’s body that made people uncomfortable, that made them look away and cross the road to avoid him. He carried himself in a way that was too precise, too measured and almost mechanical. His face was slack and expressionless, like a corpse.

  His eyes were cold and emotionless like a shark.

  Without her prison fatigues, Zero Vector looked almost a child, in her red tracksuit top, and baggy jeans. There was a fuzz of short hair around her implants.

  Echo leant forward. “Tell me what you see in the code?”

  Zero Vector looked up from the screen. “What machine was this for?”

  “Does it matter?” Nightmare asked.

  Zero Vector nodded. “If you want me to understand it.”

  Echo gestured with a finger. “It was an experimental energy field projector. You can see the way the field variables constantly change and adapt, to contain a fluxing, unstable, energy source. Tell me what you see.”

  “Is this an AI?” Zero Vector asked.

  “No.” Echo leant forwards and tapped the laptop. “That was controlled by a user.”

  Zero Vector frowned. “With what interface? I can monitor programmes, and make decisions at the speed of thought. This is something more than that. The code is reshaped over and again, like…thoughts. Like the user was part of the machine.”

  “At that moment,” Nightmare said, “he was.”

  Echo leant forwards. “Is that something you would be interested in?”

  Zero Vector wanted to say yes. Echo could see it in her eyes, in the way she was trying not to smile, and in the moment of hesitation as she composed her voice to ask: “Why me?”

  Echo looked her in the eye. “This will be a weapons test. You have already proven yourself to be capable of making certain decisions.”

  Zero Vector tapped her lips. “What kind of a weapon?”

  Echo tilted her head. “You will see. Then you may decide.”

  *

  The limousine pulled up at the gates to the Blackwell Facility, and the Thrall driver calmly handed over the papers and IDs. The soldiers checked him first, then looked in the back. They smiled at Echo, frowned at Zero Vector, and tried not to look at Nightmare.

  The guards opened the gates and waved the car through.

  Echo watched the road rolling by. At first, they were driving through a forest, a dense band of trees and snow drifts, thick enough to disguise the facility’s true nature.

  The forest gave way to marshy wetlands. The reeds and willows that jutted from the snow, were yellowing and sickly.

  The surface of the facility were squat red brick storage buildings, but there were some hints of the heavily fortified concrete bunkers beneath.

  Echo climbed out of his car, and straightened her long coat. Zero Vector followed her hesitantly, watching the soldiers dotted around the facility. Echo took her arm, and guided her into the facility, and down into the processing room of the bunker, where laboratory technicians, in respirators and heavy rubber gowns, monitored the pressurised vats and industrial plant, that gradually filled transparent spheres the size of tennis balls with a clear jelly, in which minute motes of dust were suspended.

  The equipment was shiny and new, with labels and stickers still in place.

  Echo pointed Zero Vector to the window onto a white, sterile room, with brushed steel fittings, where a man and woman in hazard suits were fitting the spheres into complex arrays, that fitted neatly into an armoured casing.

  Zero Vector watched. “What are those?”

  “Six months ago,” Echo said, “this facility was only purposed for secure storage of chemical weapons, mothballed but too dangerous to move. One of those weapons was a fungal spore. A parasite. It is attracted to mammals, birds, anything with body heat and a pulse, that needs water and oxygen to live. If a spore settles on soft tissue, it will worm down into a pore, and set down roots. It grows inwards, eating the animal from the inside out. Sucking up nutrients and vitamins, the fabric of life, and turning them into… well… more fungus, more wraithrose. You know how plants grow roots looking for water? Its roots find the liver, the kidney, the lungs, and brain. All the organs with the most useful materials to… repurpose.” She drew a breath. “It is incredibly swift. Would you like to see?”

  Two floors further down, Nightmare lurked in the corner, and Echo watched the younger girl as she stood by one of the glass specimen containers, transfixed in morbid, horrified, fascination as a single spore was released into the container, and the rabbit spent the last thirteen seconds of its life squawking in agony, writhing and clawing at its own skin, until it lay suddenly still, and the flower-like folds of scarlet fungi bloomed out from beneath its fur.

  The blooms puffed more spores into the container.

  Echo hit the purge button. Fire filled the container, and destroyed the fungi.

  Zero-Vector was shaking. “That… was…”

  “Efficient,” Echo said, laying a hand on the other girl’s shoulder. “It’s deadlier, and more effective than… dinosaur robots?” Echo narrowed her eyes. “You were born to be the fire that burned the rot, and decay, from humanity, to cleanse the race. This is the means by which you can achieve it.”

  Zero-Vector nodded. “What… do you want me to do?”

  Nightmare stepped out of the shadows, he loomed over Zero-Vector so she couldn’t look away, from his dead eyes. “We thought you might begin with Africa.”

  00001

  Thunder rumbled over Inverness, threatening as the downpour broke from the squid-ink clouds that blotted out the sky.

  Melisa Williams darted across the busy street, and into the shopping centre.

  The mall was busy with ambling shoppers, and festooned with cascades of fairy lights and glass snowflakes. The stores were all wearing their festive displays, and offering gift ideas.

  Melisa joined the queue at the coffee shop, ordering herself a cappuccino big enough to drown an elephant in, and a blueberry muffin.

  One of the other customers turned the page on their newspaper. Melisa tried not to stare at the full-page advert, with pictures of Matthew, Barney, herself, and Padmaja, with a telephone number, and the headline: ‘Have You Seen Them?’

  A cold dread radiated from Melisa’s heart, down through her bones. She had tried to change her appearance a lot since the adverts had started appearing in newspapers, and on TV channels around the world, every Wednesday and Friday. She had stopped dying her hair, and started growing it out. She had taken to wearing baseball caps and glasses with a light grey tint. She stopped wearing hoodies and plaid, and started wearing respectable jackets and forgettable tee shirts over jeans.

  The guy looked up at her. Melisa felt a champagne thrill to his thoughts, as he saw her looking.

  Melisa glanced away, toying with her hair.


  He turned the page on his newspaper, and went back to reading.

  She reached out. There was only the usual background noise echoing around the mall.

  Nobody spared her a second look, as she took her coffee to a quiet table in the corner, and settled in with her laptop. She fished the hex-ware dongle from the chain around her neck, and slipped it into the computer, before logging on to the internet, and tapping open her Secure Connection.

  A timer in the corner of her screen started a three minute countdown.

  There were two encrypted messages waiting for her.

  One was from Cathy, letting her know the team had made it to Tokyo safely.

  The other were files from a contact in the Pentagon. She tapped through the files. There were security details for the upcoming Security Summit in Paris, along with the slide show presentation to sell the idea of the Broadsword Satellite Network, and some technical specifications for the satellites themselves. She hit the download icon, and watched the blue bar crawling slowly towards one hundred percent as the seconds ticked away.

  It downloaded with nine seconds to spare.

  She tapped off the connection, and withdrew her dongle.

  Around her the world carried on as normal. She drank her coffee, and watched the crowd.

  She left the shopping by a different exit, and took a looping walk around the city centre, through the rain. She reached through her connection. Charlie?

  Their minds touched. His was still the neatly ordered labyrinth, but these days there were unquiet nightmares rattling and hammering at all the locked doors in his head.

  You aren’t being followed, he assured her.

  Thank you! She took a sharp corner and crossed the road to a supermarket car park.

  Matthew was emptying a trolley load of groceries into the trunk of a modest family car. It was middle of the range, a few years old, a few scuffs to the paintwork. Matthew was dressed like a maths teacher, in a shirt and sweater, under his dark blue overcoat, with a shaven scalp and neatly trimmed groomed beard, that he dyed an autumnal shade of brown.

  None of it suited him, but he didn’t look like his picture.

  “Hey!” He said, with a smile. “How’d it go?”

  Melisa helped him with the bags. “I think we have something.”

  Charlie came walking across the car park, lurking deep in the hood of his grey sweatshirt, that he still wore over plain, earthy clothes and bare feet.

  Mel stroked his cheek, and felt their connection. Are you okay?

  I’m fine, he promised, trying to only let her see the fuzzy glow that burned bright whenever he saw her, the part of him that got butterflies at her smile, and still couldn’t believe how beautiful her eyes were.

  His demons were still rattling their chains.

  Relatively, he admitted, sheepishly, opening the car door for her. I’m okay.

  Melisa kissed his lip and slithered into the driver’s seat.

  *

  The drove out of the city and into the Highlands, through the weather-beaten fields of heather, grass, and bracken, that clung to the sides of mountains.

  The turning for Loch Wulven was narrow lane, protected by the kinds of magic that made it easy to miss, and quickly forgotten. Trees grew on either side of the road, their branches tangled in a spiderweb, that cast knotted shadows. They emerged from the trees as the road followed the snaking banks of a long, thin, lake of peat-dark water, in a narrow valley.

  The road met the mountainside at the brick face of a tunnel, supported by thick buttresses. The tunnel appeared to be only a few feet deep, before it ended in the dark rock of the mountains.

  Melisa pulled into the mouth of the tunnel, out of the rain.

  Charlie ducked out of the car, and walked into the shadows. He placed a hand on one of the bricks. An arcane symbol, a circle of knotted mistletoe, glowed beneath his hand, as the magic in the mountainside recognised him. The wall of rock opened, revealing the rest of the tunnel.

  Charlie hopped back in, and they drove on.

  There was a slight jolt as they crossed the threshold between worlds. The tunnel opened onto a meadow of wildflowers, long grass, and butterflies, that quickly gave way to a woodland, where bluebells grew between the elm trees.

  The RMS Iliad, a grand old steam ship, from the golden days of ocean travel, rose up over the woods. Her keel was buried deep enough for her to stand more or less upright, her hull veiled in ivy, flowering vines, and climbing roses, her four great funnels clad in modern solar panels.

  For the last three months, the landlocked liner had been their home.

  Melisa followed the dusty track through the dappled shade of the trees, and parked at the foot of the gangway. Angel leant over the railing, and greeted them with a cheery wave.

  “Hey!” She called. “Any luck?”

  Matthew took the shopping in his aura and drifted casually up to her level. “Actually, Mel thinks we might have something.”

  Angel nodded. “A lead on Croft?”

  Melisa shrugged. “More of a… suggestion of where she is likely to be. They are holding a summit to get more nations to sign up to Broadsword.”

  Melisa hurried up the gangway. Summers was on a sun lounger, with a book. Padmaja was sat demurely on a bench, with a magazine, and a pot of tea.

  “Broadsword?” Padmaja perked up. “The satellite system?”

  “Yeah.” Melisa handed her the laptop. “We have some specs on it. Do you mind taking a look?”

  “Ooh!” Padmaja said, scratching at the scars under her hair. “This could be interesting!”

  Melisa smiled. “You don’t mind?”

  “Leave it with me,” Padmaja said, with a flutter of excited laughter.

  Melisa looked up at Summers. “Hey, and… the guys made it to Tokyo safe.”

  Summers smiled. “Good.”

  Melisa nodded. “She’s going to be okay.”

  “Of course,” Summers agreed. “She has Barney and Flint looking after her.”

  “Yeah.” Melisa smiled. “She’s going to be fine.”

  Summers stood up and put an arm around Melisa. “She’s going to be brilliant.”

  *

  That night, as Melisa was sinking down into sleep, she felt Charlie untangle himself from her arms, and pull the quilt up over her.

  Days in the Meadow were hot and summery, the nights were cool and drizzly, with twine moons in the sky.

  Charlie and Melisa had claimed a spacious First-Class lounge. The four poster bed was threadbare and tattered, but usable (with some fresh bedding), the wallpaper was faded, and the climbing roses had slithered in through the broken pothole and covered most the wall, giving the room a soft, sweet, aroma.

  Melisa felt, rather than saw, him sitting cross-legged on the rug. His breathing took on a gentle, hypnotic rhythm, like a lapping of waves, and his heartbeat slowed. The noise of his thoughts stilled into peace, as he eased himself down into the trance state.

  He was aware of her presence. The meditations usually helped soothe her down into present dreams. Tonight, she hung on the cusp, and sensed him opening himself to the flows of magic.

  To Melisa the touch of magic was like his mind filling with a thunderstorm, with flashing lighting, and howling wind, with rain and sleet carried on a tornado. There were voices and images caught in the storm, that whipped past, in a cacophony.

  Charlie let the storm carry him to one of the images, one of the voices, and his mind whirred, as he tuned himself into the vision, bringing it to focus.

  And just as the vision began to resolve itself, as the static began to clear away, the memories would bubble through to ambush him.

  The feel of needles worming down into his head.

  The sound Harper made when he died.

  Guilt. Anger. Fear… Because he should have moved quicker when he faced the Legion. He should have seen something change behind Harris’s eyes. He should have been faster, or stronger, or… better.

  The needles
worming into his head, and sucking him out of his body.

  The sensation of mind crumbling away into ones and zeros.

  His soul fraying, being consumed into the machine.

  Melisa was out of bed, and wrapping herself around him in a hug, even as he lurched back to awareness. His head lay on her shoulder, his tears burning against her cheek. His presence was full of fears, as cold as the grave, and stained with the anger of futility.

  “It’s okay,” she promised. “You’re safe. I’m here.”

  She helped him guide the nightmares back into their cells, as he locked down his mind, into the neatly ordered stoicism of his. The cold and anguish lingered. She stroked his hair, and let him cry.

  00010

  The nightlife in the Roppongi district of Tokyo was relentless. It was already the early hours, and some of the neon-lit clubs, and lively bars, were still going strong, with no signs of slowing down. The crowds were still boisterous, and the music was still playing.

  Catherine clung to Barney’s arm as they made their way down the busy street.

  They were being followed.

  A young man in a tracksuit had followed them since he stumbled out a convenience store. He was concealing something under his jacket that was probably a handgun.

  Barney nodded to an alleyway, running between two bars. “I think this is it.”

  “Great.” Catherine eyed the dark alley. “Do you think he’s our contact.”

  “Not likely,” Barney said. “Want to take care of him?”

  They strolled down the alley. Behind the colourful façade of the street, the buildings were utilitarian concrete, with dribbling air conditioners, and a neat row of bins. The lamps on the walls of the buildings cast pools of milky, amber light into the shadows.

  The guy in the tracksuit stepped into the alley, pulling a scarf up over his face. He pulled a pistol from his pocket, and waved it at them. “Hey! Give me your wallets, and phones! Now!”

  “Easy now,” Catherine said, stepping forwards. “Don’t do anything we’ll all regret.”

  “Hey, Lady,” the mugger said, poking his high calibre revolver under her nose. “I have the gun, so I get to¬”