by Skyler Grant
Maybe that was so. It still seemed a stupid way of looking at things. If you truly thought the world was ending you stopped it—it was just bad business to do otherwise. Besides, there was always a fortune to be made in putting a stop to any apocalypse.
I'd never figured out exactly what power levels mapped to what Class. The strongest I'd ever been able to get any sort of read on was Mastermind, who'd registered at 118,000, but I'd had reason to wonder if that was just what he wanted me to see. Ultimatum of STRONG had been at 75,500. I hadn't gotten a good reading of Lady Justice, and the leader of her team, Constitution, was 100,000. Comfortably an A-Class, and if he wasn't an S-Class yet he was bordering on it.
"I'm surprised you weren't taken too. What about Constitution?" I asked.
Lady Justice settled back in her seat, steepling her hands over her chest. "We are a team built around taking down the big threats. The threats that imperil whole worlds. Do you think we didn't prepare?"
I wondered what sort of preparation that would be. Some A-Class heroes around the world had escaped the purge, but they'd done so by being dead at the time. That didn't apply to any S-Class, because they were harder to kill, although life insurance worked on them as well.
I didn't see a life insurance bracelet on Lady Justice, and you would think that if Patriot had some way of resurrecting its people they would have returned back underground.
Gloom was starting to struggle. Patriot had stopped trying big and was going small. There were now hundreds of drones fighting her. Fast, mobile, and their frequency range was getting narrower and narrower as they found a bandwidth that was having particular effect.
Gloom was still winning, but the lasers did seem to be digging more and more into the dark mists that she conjured. I sent her in some backup. We had a wind controller on the payroll named Grey Tornado and he was just the thing to help deal with those drones.
"Have you encountered anything like those dimensional shifts before?" I asked.
Lady Justice was looking to the side. I wondered if she was watching the same combat from a different angle.
"No, that was a surprise to us. We still don't know exactly what it is or how it is being done. Our systems were designed to prevent capture but they served," Lady Justice said.
It had to be related to Patriot's abilities. People stored as data hadn't been taken. There was some sort of fail-safe and they must carry it on them, a lot like a life insurance band.
Another floor cleared. The iterations that Patriot could make for its defenses were growing more and more limited. Largely the same thing was being tried again and again now. It wasn't a formula for success, and if anyone was learning now it was Gloom.
Shadow blasts had been traded for shadow tentacles, and now motes of darkness drifted through the air. A thousand tiny, dark fireflies that hunted the drones more quickly and nimbly than the drones could hunt Gloom.
"This isn't looking good for your superior," I said.
Lady Justice stared at the monitor. "There are things we can yet try, but we admit they aren't good solutions. Patriot is willing to talk. You leave us alone and we'll help you with your current dilemma."
"Not good enough. You tried to take over this city. Before this crisis I had orders to take you down."
"You should know that we can now transmit data, and believe me, I'm not alone out here. We can transfer our operations if we have to. We'd regret losing our safe haven, but it is an option we'll use," Lady Justice said. "We'll have to start over, but you'll have to start hunting for us all over again too."
The others had remained silent until now, and I needed to confirm.
I muted the line.
"Can they do what she says?" I asked.
Niles said, "Patriot is software, and you and Uma have both relocated your core processes. I don't see any reason things would be different for Patriot. Up until this point we've been working on the idea that there was no data transmission, and they're trapped down there. Breaking through the levels works both ways ..."
Fantastic, we couldn't let Patriot get out in one piece without being allied to us. It was the one way the current mess might get even worse.
"Subsidiary status. We won't take over Patriot's systems, but they become a part of the company," I offered after unmuting the line.
"We way out-power you," Lady Justice said.
"And I have leverage. You can try to leave, but there is a real chance of destruction that way. The data transmission could be corrupted. Doesn't your mission come first?"
Ideology, it was a key to recruitment.
I saw that it was working. And now Lady Justice had a distant look to her eyes. Telepathy? Some sort of communications implant.
"Deal. We'll work out the details later," Lady Justice said.
The drone swarm fighting Gloom vanished in a shimmer of energy. I sent a message to Gloom to hold back and withdraw.
We had our alliance. It was time to do something with it.
27
"You can see here how we'd handle any dispute in subsection seven," Constitution said.
It was brutal and agonizing beyond anything I'd thought possible—negotiating the fine-print. I'd scanned Constitution before and knew that under his powers it listed 'Lawyer', but I'd never made the connection that his lawyer power might in fact be super-powered. It was, it really was.
Jules, who was the most pedantic and attention-focused of anyone in the company, was doing her best to keep pace and I could tell that even she was overwhelmed.
They'd been going back and forth for hours over a contract that had taken Constitution less than an hour to draw up.
"You really should have just let me kill them all," Gloom said, watching the play-by-play on a monitor as she fought off a yawn.
Perhaps I should have. On the plus side, after this contract was signed, Constitution and his unbelievable legal muscle would be on my side. Oh, the litigious possibilities.
Gloom's wrist went dark—everybody's wrist went dark.
The steady, faint glow of life insurance was something that you took for granted. When it went out across the board something was seriously wrong.
"What is going on with Emmatech?" I asked.
It might seem odd for me to ask, given I was directly tied into the city's networks and I should be able to find out for myself, but those networks had just gone crazy. They were a storm of noise and feeds. The city-wide alarm was going off.
Uma found a way to cut through it. In our control center screens popped up showing the local Emmatech tower—or at least the mushroom cloud rising from its location. Radioactive alarms were blaring.
Emmatech had just been nuked.
It wasn't just the local tower either. There were feeds coming in from other cities. The New Londonarium branch was showing a similar cloud. There was another cloud with Disaster Tower in the distance.
"Is it the Swarm?" Gloom asked.
Jules had sent a query asking what was wrong. I told her to keep working on the contract. We could figure this out without her, and we needed Patriot more than ever.
"There are traces of dimensional energy, but ... no ... I don't think so. This is our technology, the dimensional focuser," Niles said.
The technology we'd developed to take out the Swarm. Someone had repurposed it, tied nuclear bombs to it and launched them at the other major extra-dimensional forces on the planet.
"Who?" I asked.
The question was almost moot. This wasn't the way that the heroes did business, and there were only two possibilities I saw with the technical expertise to pull this off. I didn't really think it was Patriot—it had been busy with us and that contract, for all it was tedious, seemed very real.
"Launch origin tracked," Niles said, pulling up a map of the ocean, a marker indicating where the missiles had been fired.
There was nothing on the surface. It was far from Voltara's last known submarine location, but I hadn't expected her to stay still.
The clo
ud was fading and we started to get our first visuals of the Emmatech building, or what was left of it. There wasn't much. Charred-looking formations that had once been part of buildings. They almost seemed to be moving—no, they were moving.
If I'd taken the regeneration ability that had been offered to me, I thought this is what it would have looked like. The building was reconstruction itself.
"Can I get confirmation that is happening?" I asked.
Niles' life insurance bracelet came back on, and the same happened to three of our henchmen. One at a time, others started to reappear.
A figure walked out of the ruins, her clothing in tatters, but even that appeared to be restoring itself. What I saw of her flesh looked totally unmarked.
Ox could take a nuclear bomb to the face with his latest invincibility upgrade. Not many could come even close to that. Deanna had more power than I'd thought.
The comm on her wrist looked to have already been restored. I gave her a call.
"Not a great time, Walter," Deanna said.
"I see that. I'm monitoring you from the city infrastructure. This wasn't us. Well, it wasn't me."
"We know. It was Voltara. This isn't good. Our network is only back to partial strength. We'll recover, in time, and she isn't strong enough to take us out. In the meantime she can do a lot of harm," Deanna said.
"She's not wrong, boss. I've got more missile launches. They aren't nuclear signatures at least, but there are a lot of them," Niles said.
Plotting brought up their paths on one screen. The trajectories could only project their probable destinations, and they were all in the general areas just hit. Emmatech had branch offices in all the major cities, and it looked like this was a secondary strike on those cities both Hero and Villain. Voltara was cleaning up the competition, and with the life insurance system only at partial power she'd kill a lot of people if they hit.
"Voltara just launched a secondary strike. Can you get the life insurance system network up?" I asked.
Deanna cocked her head to the side. "Three minutes until the first hits. We can do it, but our growth vats—actually bringing people back—it's going to take awhile. The technology is hard for us to replicate here."
Growth vats were a stupid name. If I could manufacture people, I'd call the facility human resources. I was good with branding.
I sent messages to all the cities that were targets. The villain ones might not have anything they could do, recent events having left our systems in shambles. The hero cities were, in theory, in better shape.
I cut the line with Deanna. Emmatech had their own business to deal with and I just had to hope they could make a success of it.
"Can we fend off that missile strike?" I asked.
Niles tapped rapidly at the keys and frowned. "They seem to have dimensional shielding. The new weapons would work, but we haven't actually made them yet."
There was a shimmer in the control center, a warping of an energy field that flared bright for a moment and faded to reveal Lady Justice.
"Contract signed. We are here to help as agreed. Large parts of the room are about to go boom. What do you need?" Lady Justice asked.
"Missiles are incoming. Non-nuclear, but still missiles. Can you stop them?" I asked.
Lady Justice moved to stare at the monitors and beamed a smile. "Nice. Full-on war, you have no idea how many projections we used to run on this. We're low on power and don't have time to integrate into the local network. We can try protecting maybe ten cities?"
"You'll need specialized weapons. These are the schematics," Niles said. A monitor rapidly flashed through them. Lady Justice focused her attention on the screen intently. Patriot must have some sort of mental link with her.
"Sweet guns, I don't understand them at all, but we can build them. Needs specialized resources too. Eight cities at best," Lady Justice said.
"We don't need to save ours. I can get our existing defenses to work on the missiles headed this way," Niles said.
We hadn't done very well with that first one aimed at Emmatech. I took his word for it.
The heroes could better fend for themselves, and besides, they were sort of the opposition still. If anyone had to take some losses, I would rather it be them.
Across the planet fighters materialized in the path of the missiles and moved to engage them.
The heroes were moving to stop theirs as well, and they weren't having much success. They didn't have their new weapons constructed either and they needed powerful heroes—and ones that could fly—to intercept the missiles.
Several already had teams of new A-Class up and running and they were able to intercept with enough power that even with the dimensional shielding they were able to punch through and destroy some missiles. The other cities took hits.
Patriot was as good an ally as we were hoping for and all eight of the cities it defended had the missiles neutralized. Niles was also as good as his word. Our defenses held and felled all the missiles heading in our direction.
Despite those victories, the overall results of this assault were catastrophic. Cities across the globe had been reduced to flaming ruins in an instant.
"New launches. They look to be more traditional hover ships," Niles said.
Voltara had broken the defenses of the world, knocked cities down, and now she was intent on robbing them blind. I had to admire her a bit, however much this inconvenienced our own plans.
And I had to find a way to destroy her.
28
I called a conference of every major power that I could think of that wasn't Voltara. Taking her down was going to require the best that the Earth had to offer. S-Class were almost unstoppable for a reason.
Deanna was now in our conference room representing Emmatech, Cascadia the Council, Lady Justice on behalf of Patriot, and Gloom. Of my own staff I just had Jules as our tactical coordinator.
"You know why we've called you all here. Voltara has violated the Omega accords, and made strikes on holdings across the world belonging to all of us. We must deal with the Swarm, but before we do we must deal with her," Jules said.
"The official position of the Council is that it isn't just Voltara who violated the accords. She was your responsibility to handle and you failed," Cascadia said, glancing around the table.
"Meaning what? You aren't going to help us at all?" Jules asked.
Cascadia shrugged. "I know you better than most. I don't think you intended this, but my own influence is diminished after this. On a limited-scale I might be able to offer you some support. If you are expecting a global hero response you aren't going to get one."
Well, at least we could cross them off the list. It was unfortunate. They were still our best hope of resolving things cleanly despite how much they'd taken a punch to their organization and sheer numbers.
It was tempting to just kick Cascadia out of the room, and it was probably wise to allow her to remain. This rift would have to be mended somehow and it we could start by letting her observe firsthand our actions to resolve this situation.
Gloom said, "Why does anyone else need to be here at all? I'm S-Class, Voltara is S-Class. We go one-on-one and I take her down."
"Because she is an S-Class with centuries to prepare for a big fight—to both master her abilities and gather resources. The very fact that she can manage a global strike like this speaks to just how well she prepared," Jules said.
"We know her, you know. Although in our time she was more in the public eye. Made her fortune in tech, a real social-mover," Lady Justice said.
It made sense. In a way they were both people out of time.
"Anything that helps us to stop her?" I asked.
Lady Justice shook her head. "No, just that you should be careful. She's smart and paranoid. That was true then and it seems even more so now."
It did.
Deanna said, "You aren't going to have an easy task taking her down. In a quick period of time she seems to have mastered some of the basics of dimensi
onal technology. It's something of a game-changer." She really didn't look any of the worse for having a nuke dropped on her, perhaps a little tired around the eyes.
"Suggestions?" I asked her.
"I'm not here to give them. Consider me something of an interested observer, at best. We'll intervene in this fight if we have to, but we don't want to," Deanna said.
A lot of people had decided to show up at this meeting to not be very helpful.
Lady Justice said, "You already gave us blueprints to some anti-dimensional weaponry. With sufficient power we can create more. We've forces designed to operate underwater, although they aren't as numerous as our ground and aerial models."
"If she's working this much with dimensional technology, would she have something like the dimensional singularity in play? I've seen the records of our run from the other timeline," Jules said.
The other timeline, when we had attacked Doctor Kento and his lab. Yesterday had undone it, and she'd brought back extensive records.
"She would have to. Probably more a full-on rift given how much she's used it," Deanna said.
Now they were being helpful again. I wished people would make up their minds.
"Can we use that? There is a risk of both you and the Swarm overusing your dimensional tunnels that you've spoken about," I asked.
"Maybe," Deanna said. After a distant look she tapped on her communicator. "What do you think, Amy?"
"That you look amazing and what a great group of people! You know we're supposed to stay out of it," Amy chirped through her comm.
"We're barely in it. Nudging, we're just sort of nudging," Deanna said.
"Uh huh," Amy said, sounding like she didn't believe any of it. "The equations are really complex and while you're all super-smart and wonderful and great at everything, we need someone really good at this one thing."
The air shimmered rainbow for a moment and a confused-looking Doctor Kento appeared in the room. He was wearing pajamas with tiny pictures of Magnolia on them.
