by Skyler Grant
This single globule in the cluster was large enough it might hold all of those that were missing.
Our reactor strained again as Patriot created hundreds of new drones. Each of these was armed with a precision laser scalpel and sensors, robotic doctors designed to rescue our people. They each had enough tranquilizer that they should knock out even S-Class. If Disaster was in a bad mood—and how could she not be—we didn't want her screaming in our general direction. This tower might be a juggernaut, but it wasn't enough to survive that.
Gloom had finished with the first ship, but I was getting a dozen more on our long-range sensors. There was a massive vessel at least four times our size. We couldn't stay here forever, and any prolonged fight we were sure to lose.
The Swarm looked to be getting better at fighting us. Our drones were fast and agile, but their armored combatants were no longer using the electric weapons, swapping them out for what appeared to be miniature homing bees. What was it with all of this organic technology? It seemed a terribly inefficient sort of system. I couldn't help notice it seemed similar to some of what I'd seen Emmatech using. I wondered if they were in some way related, or in other dimensions was biological technology much more commonplace than on our Earth?
"First reports are in. They're alive, but biometrics are weak. They've had some sort of shunts installed? For feeding and excreting possibly?" Niles asked.
Humans were so disgusting.
"You already have holes for each. Don't be silly," I said.
Niles paused and frowned.
The tower rocked. A massive energy beam had just hit it from one of the ships. There were too many now for Gloom to effectively block.
"We've got Mastermind," Niles said.
"I want him pumped full of every stimulant we have and on the bridge. This situation is getting ugly in a hurry," I said.
A blast of energy caught Gloom and she went spiraling backwards. When I scanned her, I got an odd result—her power level was dropping. It was happening slowly, but I'd never seen something like this in real time before.
More than that, the darkness around Gloom was starting to fade.
Glimmerdust had become Gloom when her father was removed from our dimension, getting an upgrade to S-Class in the process. Now that she and Mastermind were sharing the same dimension again the process must be reversing.
The enemy had changed tactics again. While a few drones still harassed those bringing the fallen supers inside, increasingly they were coming straight for the tower. Purple beams raked our shields, which were rapidly depleting. It wasn't just that they were doing damage—they were siphoning away our power.
The reactors were already starting to dip in output, and that was something we wouldn't survive for long. Patriot was a major part of our defense, and it needed power above anything else.
31
Mastermind was led into the control room. When he'd come out of the pustule he'd been covered in mucous and unconscious. A hose down and a pharmacy's worth of stimulants had done something to correct both.
It didn't stop Mastermind from stumbling as he made his way to occupy his seat.
The displays were showing their usual streams of data and he could barely muster the strength to look at them.
"If you're going to provide us any brilliant tactical insights, now would be the time," I said.
Mastermind made a half-hearted sort of grunt, one hand beginning to type away at a display on the arm of the chair. Updated tactical data. It didn't seem to make a lot of sense, and I had to only hope Mastermind knew what he was doing.
The new cannon targets sent the Swarm into disarray. It didn't really wipe any of them out, but it slowed their attacks for a time as they regrouped into position.
"My daughter, she is okay?" Mastermind asked.
I opened a comm.
"I'm here, Dad, though I don't know why," Gloom said, her voice pained. She was starting to take a pummeling out there.
"I'm barely here. You need to get aboard and we have to get out of here," Mastermind said, so exhausted he could barely get the words out.
That was easier said than done. To return home we'd need to get back to the same cluster we'd arrived, where Earth's dimensional signature could be traced, and it looked like the Swarm understood that. The bulk of their numbers were between it and us, cutting us off from our escape as they continued to drain our energy.
We'd retrieved about seventy percent of those abducted. We weren't being picky about hero or villains. There wasn't a real way to determine who was in what pustule in the time we had. I just had to hope that whatever way it turned out there was a profit to be found.
Saving more was ideal, and until we had a way through the Swarm we could stay in place, but we needed that escape route.
"We need a way to break through," I said, sending a summary of our troubles to the screens.
Mastermind looked over them and winced as if struggling with a headache. One hand continued to tap at the side display. He was cycling through data on the building upgrades, the changes we'd made.
"I'm too weak. I can't see it, and I can't see a way through. I need the dimensional crystal—you need to get it back too," Mastermind said, his voice growing weaker with every word. A last few taps of his hand set a targeting cursor on a different globule and Mastermind slumped in his chair, unconscious again.
Our great hope wasn't giving me any.
"Get him out of here and to a medical bay," I told the henchmen on the bridge.
"Is Daddy gone?" Gloom asked through the comm. The line was still open.
"He's gone, he isn't in good shape. They took a lot out of him," I said.
"I wanted something bad to happen to him for so long. Now I find myself furious at the thought we won't get to slug it out ourselves. Will he survive the crystal, if he gets it?" Gloom asked.
Niles tapped away on his keys. "From what we're seeing I don't think so. It might bolster his powers for a time, but he's too weak. I think it will kill him."
"Then I am going after it myself. I need to make it fast, I'm losing strength by the minute," Gloom said.
Gloom was still probably an S-Class, but now on the weaker side of things and she wouldn't be one for much longer. We'd also just saved Mastermind, and if anything happened to her, Mastermind would make us very, very dead.
I didn't see any alternatives. There were other S-Class that we'd rescued, including Disaster, who was normally the strongest of them, but according to the medical diagnostics coming in though she wasn't in any better shape than Mastermind.
"Sending you the coordinates. As soon as you start powering up, blast us a way through," I said.
"Boss, we don't know what that thing is going to do to her," Niles said.
"I'm well aware. Patriot, as soon as we're within range of the rift I want to start sending people through it. If you dematerialize them here can you rematerialize them on the other side?" I asked.
"With freedom and the will of true patriots all things are possible," Patriot said.
I'd take that as a yes.
"We need to seal the rift behind us. Set the engines to overload. As soon as Gloom gets the crystal kill the shields and charge the rift. Cut our energy drain and get us ready," I said.
"It is going to be tight," Niles said.
Tight was better than hopeless. Gambling wasn't always about getting the best hand, it was about doing your best with the hand you were dealt.
Gloom, streaming strands of darkness and light behind her, plunged into the globule. Several seconds after she entered there was a disruption of space that could be felt even at a distance. Green lightning crackled around the globule, wracking the surface for several long moments before it exploded.
Gloom wasn't looking good. The crystal had somehow embedded itself in the middle of her forehead, glowing a brilliant green, and lightning was running up and down her body. Her hands extended, one fired a stream of pure ebon darkness towards the Swarm and the other bursts of
light.
"What is happening to her?" I asked.
"I don't know. Theoretically? Gloom is sort of two different people right now. Hero and Villain, Light and Darkness. I think there's too much power in that crystal for any one of them to handle and so it's charging both," Niles said.
Perhaps so. You could actually see the color palettes shifting across her body, the two sides warring for control. I ran a statistical analysis and the dark was winning, barely.
Our engines kicked to full power as our shields fell. Without our defenses the energy-sapping beams hit our armor plating directly and failed to do much. It didn't take the Swarm long to adapt and to resume fire with their homing missile bees.
Gloom's biometrics were all over the map. I was a little astonished those sensors were still working at all. That much charge should have fried the nanites, but they seemed to be holding up, for the most part, I wondered if they might be getting something of an upgrade as well.
"We're in position," Niles said.
Throughout the ship those we'd rescued began to shimmer and disappear. They were being sent to the other side along with some of our non-critical personnel.
Gloom continued to show signs of instability. There were changes of mass, she was growing, then shrinking. Temperature, proportions, all were in a constant state of flux.
There was no way a normal human being could ever survive something like that, but Gloom wasn't exactly a normal human being.
By now our armor wasn't faring well against the pummeling it was taking. It had been designed to take a few hits. A sustained assault from superior technology was just not the sort of thing it could take.
Everywhere Gloom went, Swarm died. Our other supers had almost all fallen by this point, the few A-Class still hanging in there all much the worse for wear. Even those with invincibility got tired.
"Time to go," I told Niles.
A last few tap of his keys and Niles vanished.
The ship was deserted now except for us artificial intelligences, the humans all sent to the other side.
One at a time our defenders blinked out in shimmers of light. Gloom was the last, Patriot had a hard time even locking onto her, so variable was her existence right now, but eventually she too was gone and we were alone with the Swarm.
Over a hundred ships were approaching our location, and those in power armor now numbered nearly ten thousand. Our armor was rent and torn, and soon they were boarding.
The building defenses did what they could, auto-cannons tearing a few insects in half, but the Swarm was largely unopposed.
Meanwhile the engines just kept cycling, every bit of power they generated being fed back in. Overloading the circuits, creating an out-of-control loop.
I keyed a last packaging of my files and sent them through the rift. An update to let the version of my software on the other side know all that had happened here. A lot of excuses needed to be made to Mastermind.
Then I unleashed the last of the safeties.
The explosion tore through the tower, and then the Swarm beyond. The dimensionally charged blast closing off the gateway to Earth forever.
32
"We're going to finish the quarter in the red. A lot of that is one-time write-offs. We've had to absorb a lot of the repairs to the city in our own books," Jules said.
You save the world, and sometimes you get stuck with the bill. It was yet another reason heroics didn't pay, or at least if it did it was a long-term play.
Saving so much of the population hadn't exactly made us popular, or at least not universally popular. All of those vying for position and promotions hated to suddenly have the old bosses back.
Oh, it had made us some friends. Bouncy had done enough in the last few months that I'd made her a vice president. She wasn't the only hero curious about villains and I'd found the opposite to be true too. There was quite a lot of interest on both sides for products, services, and tourism, and while all of that required major investment it looked to be a promising future revenue stream.
No ordinary villain could have pulled it off, and for all that we now had a lot of enemies we had some friends too. The heroes were more fragmented than they'd been. The Council had left the greatest super teams to die and people knew it. Most of the heroes had relocated to the one region that had done anything to save them. New Londonarium was now the home to all the most powerful heroes on Earth.
It was an opportunity elsewhere in the world. Disaster had tripled the size of her territory, and Totem, a new S-Class, had managed to claim almost half a continent.
Gloom had yet to recover from whatever the crystal was doing. Shortly after coming through the portal she'd collapsed, becoming comatose with powerful changes still shaping her body. In the months since, they'd decreased and she appeared to be stabilizing, but had yet to regain consciousness.
Mastermind visited her every day, but he too wasn't well. Between Gloom's inheriting his status and role, and whatever the Swarm had done to him, Mastermind never fully regained his S-Class abilities. Still a brilliant tactical mind, it was however one somewhere in the A-Class range.
We were a villain city right across the channel from the new home of the Earth's mightiest heroes—and with Mastermind diminished and Gloom, unconscious, we were completely without real protection. It was the greatest kept secret on Mastermind Isle.
Our organization had kept right on doing what we'd started under Gloom, running the city administration. Really we were doing our best to cover for Mastermind. Mix his very best ideas with a bit of deception to present the illusion he was his old self.
So far it was working. The heroes hadn't wiped us out and the city's villains hadn't risen in revolt.
However, we expected that one day the game would be up.
In the meantime we were doing all we could to get stronger. Niles was now on the twelfth generation of his clockwork armor. With his super-human intelligence its capabilities kept growing.
Jules no longer needed the ambrosia. With each great deed, with each legendary action, her power increased. I made sure she was in the action, that she always got the spotlight.
Uma had kept trying to get out of her teddy-bear body, right up until she met Benji-bear, a childhood toy who, empowered with the hopes and dreams of a child, had become a great protector. They were dating, it was weird.
Ox had recruited Doctor Kento. If there was one thing that attracted scientists it was piles of money and no ethics. Together they led our R&D and while I still thought science was dumb, I was also learning that it could mean PROFIT.
Heroic sacrifice or no, I still didn't like Gloom, or whatever name fit her now. We also needed her—business wasn't something you always had the luxury of doing with those you liked.
Whatever came our way, we'd get by. We all weren't just friends, we were something better than that, coworkers.
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