Full Metal Superhero Box Set [Books 1-6]

by Haskell, Jeffery H.

  I shoot through the sky, breaking the sound barrier as I go, letting the concussive force from the speed calm my turbulent thoughts. Flying has got to be the best part of having the suit. I wouldn’t trade this for anything. Epic throws a course on the HUD for me to follow back to the Spire. A clock pops up, counting down my ETA. I lean to the right and the suit adjusts, taking a lazy right turn until it lines up with the virtual path.

  Incoming priority call from Kate.

  “Amelia, where are you right now?” my best friend asks.

  I check my altitude and speed with a quick glance before answering. “Uh, about... twenty-two thousand feet above the Arizona desert,” I tell her.

  An explosion of static drowns out her reply. When the interference dies down, I can hear her again.

  “Can you stop? Carlos and I need your help out here in California.”

  If Carlos needs help, there has to be a significant threat to life. But why just those two? Where’s the rest of the team? I know Carlos goes off and does his own thing often. He has rules he has to follow, rules given him by the oracle of Apollo.

  Despite my doubts about the ancient Greek gods being alive in another dimension, I find myself missing Pythia. She certainly made life interesting.

  “Yeah, give me ten seconds,” I tell her. “Epic, red alert!” I throw the suit into a full stop, grunting as G’s slip by my kinetic manipulators. The familiar green of my HUD vanishes as red takes over, highlighting combat systems, flight, and the electronic warfare suite. The armor reconfigures slightly as well. Extra plates on my back which normally help with flight stability, shift around to reinforce my vitals.

  Kate appears with a pop of displaced air. Her black form-fitting bodysuit and combat boots look as perfect as ever. I notice she has her bandoleer of non-lethal grenades strapped to her torso, along with both the IP pistols I designed for her. She also has her own versions of the Sword O’ Doom: a pair of twenty-four inch long blades strapped to her back.

  She slaps the front of my armor, catching the handholds I have purposely installed for just this event. “Hang on,” she says with a grin. Quantum teleportation isn’t my favorite thing in the world—I end up feeling like I left my stomach behind and it’s running to catch up.

  The Arizona landscape vanishes, replaced by a jarring smashup of California city and farmland. I think most people forget how many farms there are on in the Golden State. My GPS flags the town as Lompoc, population forty-seven thousand.

  We appear in the middle of state highway 246, where the road heads west toward the coast through a bunch of farmland. I immediately see what the problem is.

  “Are the rest of the Protectors on the way?” I ask Kate.

  She shakes her head. “There’s a four-alarm fire in Phoenix they’re fighting. It’s just us, come on!” she shouts as she vanishes in a pop of displaced air.

  The two-lane highway is a mess of overturned cars and abandoned vehicles. Firetrucks coming from the city to the East, wail as they approach, along with police and EMTs. Whatever happened, just happened. I see the thing that probably called for Carlos to be here. A series of school buses line the side of the road disgorging children running into the nearest field and away from the fight up ahead.

  “Full power to all weapons,” I tell Epic.

  Done.

  I blast through the air, flipping over to give myself a birds-eye view of the battlefield. And it is a battlefield. People flee in every direction. Ahead, there is an overturned military truck with an orbital rocket payload dumped on the side of the road with its casing peeled back like a grape.

  That’s when I see him. Or “hims?” Not sure what the plural for one person is. Epic identifies him as Multiplex the self-proclaimed “One-man army.” I hate when the villains have taglines. He’s dressed in worn-out clothes that look like he stole them from a homeless man.

  “Epic, give me the rundown on this fool.”

  He has the ability to replicate himself, with the apparent potential to do so an infinite number of times. It is unknown if he is his replicates or if they are merely clones that he controls. The danger comes in his ability to absorb the properties of whatever he touches. He can only maintain one set at a time, but all his duplicates have the same abilities as whatever he absorbs. In this case, he seems to have absorbed something from the SLS rocket he has destroyed.

  “Oh, that’s what that is,” I say, glancing back the way we came. I don’t know how much those things cost, but they’re easily in the double-digit millions. I land on top of an abandoned SUV with all its doors open. This is a lot to take in. Epic starts tagging Multiplex’s clones, showing me the locations and highlighting them so they are easier to see in the mass of people trying to flee, while Carlos, The Protector, goes toe-to-toe with Multiplex’s partner.

  I think I’d pay money to watch this fight. His name is Galactic Knight, and he’s one of the newer bad guys to show up. He’s dressed in fantasy looking plate armor—not the real stuff, but a movie idea of it. Sleek, form-fitting, and dull gray color. He fights with what history would call an arming sword, paired with a kite shield. The shield and the sword glow with a dark light that defies classification. It sparks like two battery leads touching every time he strikes Carlos’ shield, Aegis.

  He is an F5 in both strength and invulnerability. It is unclear if his abilities are because of his armor and weapons or if he generates them.

  “Awesome. Okay, Carlos has him, let’s focus on Multiplex. Any idea who the original is?”

  While Epic scans the crowd for the possible source of the army of clones, I start taking the fight to them. I jump up in the air and do an Emdrive assisted slam on one as he runs for a white sedan that still has people in it. I’m not sure if he’s trying to hurt them or if he’s trying to keep us distracted; I guess it doesn’t matter. I come down hard on him, riding his head into the asphalt. The ground shatters and spiderwebs on impact. He starts to push up, trying to shrug me off, which surprises the heck out of me.

  “IP Canon, tight beam, full strength.” From point-blank range I fire into the back of his head. He spasms as the nerve signal-disrupting energy arcs around him like a Tazer on steroids. He twitches for a second before falling flat on his face. “It’s about dang time,” I cheer in triumph. My frigging IP canons haven’t had the best track record of late.

  I check the people in the car; they’re trying to get out but it looks like another car collided with them and jammed their doors. I leap over the vehicle, dig my fingers into the frame of the door and heave. It rips off with no resistance and I let it sail behind me into the dirt. I give the woman driving a thumbs up and she weekly returns it.

  There are fifty-seven versions of Multiplex. Currently, Kate is dispatching one every seven seconds. I am still not sure if lethal force will hurt the original, so I suggest using the least amount needed.

  “Any idea what they’re after?” I ask him as I leap into the air, leaving the people in the car to take care of themselves.

  I have scanned the databases and websites we have access to and have not found anything of use. Would you like me to go into the NASA computers?

  “No, let’s keep the felonies to a minimum. We’ll deal with whatever it is when the time comes.”

  I zap another Multiplex, taking him down before hitting another one. There has to be a reason they’re here. I can’t imagine—

  “Amelia, look out!” I hear Carlos warn me, too late. A car slams into me, knocking me from the air and crashing me into the ground before coming to rest on top of me.

  “Ow,” I say as I push against the car. It lifts off me a lot easier than I think it should. Mostly because Carlos lifts it up and tosses the vehicle into the empty field with one hand.

  “You okay?”

  You have multiple contusions. Luckily, the majority of the energy was absorbed by the kinetic shields.

  “Epic says I’m fine.”

  That is not even remotely what I said.

  “Uh-
huh. I can’t seem to stop this guy, he takes everything I have and gives it right back to me. We’re too evenly matched—wanna trade?” Carlos asks. With his helmet on I can only see his eyes, nose, and mouth. Sweat beads on his forehead from the fight, but he has a smile on his face.

  “You think I can take him?” I ask.

  “The pen is mightier and all that,” he says.

  I nod. “Fine, take down as many Multiplexes as you can.” He claps me on the shoulder and leaps past me. Fifty feet away, Galactic Knight swipes his sword uselessly at Kate who dances around him like a mosquito, slashing at him with her swords in an attempt to cut his skin.

  “Epic, spin up Rockem Sockem.”

  Advanced Pugilist Variant loaded and ready.

  “Initiate!”

  154

  Since I decided to focus on specialized suits, a lot of problems I had trying to make one suit do everything, became far easier to conquer. It only takes thirty seconds to switch suits if I need to, since my base suit remains the same. I’m just adding on to whatever I’m already wearing. The quantum gate opens up beneath me and I fall through and past the initial staging area. The nets retract since I don’t need them. I bypass the synthsuit sprayer and go right to the articulating arm, which grabs me. A dozen other arms come out of the wall, removing the flight suit before bringing the much bulkier and far stronger Rockem Sockem suit online.

  When it’s all done, the gate opens beneath me and I drop through again into the same space I was in less than a minute before. I hit the ground with a teeth-jarring quake.

  “Yo, Galactic Squire, get some.” Rockem Sockem is eight feet tall, outfitted with kinetic springs loaded with as much stored energy as I could squeeze into the suit. They vibrate with tension. They take thirty seconds to recharge, but my first two punches will hit like a train. I got the idea from watching Tia fight in Buenos Aires.

  I run toward him, the different parts of the suit have Emdrives assisting in their movement. Epic makes the whole thing work: since a couple of dozen individual parts have to move together in concert, I could never manually drive this thing without him.

  “Just because you changed your suit, doesn’t make you anything more than a ninety-pound weakling,” he says, bringing up his shield to take my blows. Kate vanishes in a pop as she goes on to deal with Multiplex and the various threats he represents.

  I smile as he stands there to take it. The only problem with his strategy is he thinks I’m going to hit his shield. Just before I get to him, I pop the jets and leap up. Kinetic manipulators kick in, giving me an ‘attraction’ to the ground. Springs fire and I unleash a punch capable of leveling a small mountain—right on the center of his face as he looks up with his mouth open.

  The blow flattens his features, bones break, and his eyeballs bulge and the last I see of him is his broken teeth flying across the ground as I sail past. I land on the other side, spinning around with a two-step that nearly throws me off balance. I’m pretty sure I leveled him, but I don’t want to get a sword through the back.

  He falls flat on his back, sword and shield scattering to either side of him.

  “And for the record, I weigh one-forty.”

  I don’t wait for him to respond, it would be a long wait. His vitals are consistent with an unconscious person. I give him a quick glance as I jog by, his body shaking with each of my footfalls in this heavy suit. His shattered face rolls to one side, tongue hanging out through broken teeth and mashed lips. Well, he deserved it. I don’t know if he was considered good looking before, but he certainly won’t be now!

  Like a shot, all the Multiplexes run for the fields in thirty different directions. Kate takes off to the north, Carlos heads south, throwing his spear as he leaps over a car. The magic weapon strikes a Multiplex in the back, sending him flailing to the ground. This suit has my standard array of weapons; I let the grenade launcher sing its anthem. Pod after pod sticks to the Multiplexes, sending them floating up into the sky.

  As one they all start laughing. A creepy almost hysterical laugh... and then all the clones vanish. A shower of pods fall from the sky, their simple program terminating the effect as they detect they’re no longer attached to a target. It leaves us with a street full of broken cars, a handful of AG pods and only one prisoner to show for it.

  Carlos lands with a thud next to me, followed by Kate popping into existence.

  “Thanks, Amelia, I don’t think we would have avoided casualties without you,” he says with a smile. “I like the new look, very gorilla of you.”

  I smile inside the suit. “It’s for dealing with muscle-bound oafs granted more power than they know what to do with,” I say, punching him lightly on the shoulder.

  He mocks a hurt look. “I’m not sure if I should be offended or worried,” he replies rubbing his shoulder.

  “A little from column A, a little from column B,” I reply with a ‘fifty-fifty’ hand motions. “Epic is uploading the footage to the new Superhumans Crime division of the FBI. You two mind filling in the gaps for me?” I ask.

  Part of the reform that happened while I was away: with fewer super-teams, but those teams granted expanded law-enforcement responsibilities, they disbanded the DMHA. Which was probably a good idea since they were partly responsible for Ericsson’s rise to power.

  Which makes me wonder how the rest of the world deals with it. The UN turned a blind eye to the Red Wizard, despite the CIA clearly knowing he was a threat. Of course, no one did anything about it until it was too late. I still can’t believe he thought he would get away with pinning all his destruction on me. And then, when that didn’t turn out the way he wanted, he sacrificed himself upon the altar of mass murderer to ‘prove’ superhumans were bad. I can’t quite wrap my head around that level of belief. I’d call it crazy, but so-called crazy people are irrational. That’s pretty much the definition of crazy. He wasn’t irrational, just evil and wrong.

  Kate interrupts my deep thoughts. “Carlos and I are tracking a new villain, or at least I think he’s new. It’s hard to tell since he may...” she glances over at Carlos giving him a questioning look.

  “She won’t believe you,” he answers with a shrug.

  “Wait,” I say holding my hands up. “Start over from the beginning.”

  “This might take a while. Kate, wanna take us somewhere more private?” Carlos asks Kate while putting his hand on her shoulder. Wow, I hadn’t realized they were that friendly. The old Carlos would never, ever, touch Kate in such a casual way.

  She looks past me to the coming law-enforcement agencies. “It’s okay,” I say, interpreting her look. “Epic is talking to them right now. I think the local chief of police is having some trouble thinking of him as an AI; he keeps calling him, Mr. Epic.”

  The chief thinks it is my superhero name. Though I would prefer ‘Captain Epic.’ I need a costume for my digital manifestation. Maybe something patriotic.

  “Epic, you’re patriotic?” Kate asks.

  I am an American. I was born here, was I not? America has a great many beautiful things about it which are not erased by her apparent flaws and turbulent history. I do not think it would have been possible for Amelia to create me in any other country.

  “It’s just... You seem so willing to break the laws when Amelia needs you too,” Carlos adds.

  The country and the government are not the same things.

  “Out of the mouth of babes,” Kate says with a chuckle. “How about the Spire? Fleet is there so I can ‘port to him,” Kate says.

  “Sounds good. I could use a Coke,” I tell her.

  Thirty minutes and one freaked out Fleet later—since we ported on top of him as he was coming out of the bathroom—we’re chilling in the break room. I’m back in my chair wearing a pair of tight-fitting yoga pants. Loose pants and a wheelchair don’t mix. Along with that, I have a blue turtleneck sweater on that Kate bought me for my birthday. I don’t even want to know how much it cost. Kate’s rocking a pair of leather pants and a spag
hetti string tank top with the red cross logo and a caption that says, “This won’t hurt a bit.” I have to say… she’s hot. From her perfectly manicured shoulder-length black hair down to her three-inch heeled biker boots. I was pretty stunned when I rolled in to see her dressed so overtly sexy. Usually, she goes for a much more subdued look. Carlos is rocking a pair of faded denim jeans and a white t-shirt that hugs his stupid muscles like it was painted on.

  They’re sitting closer together than is probably polite, talking to each other in hushed whispers. The rest of the large room is mostly empty since it’s mid-morning and no one is really on break yet. I wave to a couple of the maintenance staff as I roll by; they’re all smiles.

  “Hi, Clark, Kara, nice to see you,” I say. I think they're impressed I know their names.

  I roll up to my friends and put my elbows on my knees and give them my best “What’s going on here,” look. To my surprise, Kate frowns at me. Of all the people who could claim an exemption if I teased them about their love life. Kate isn’t even on the list.

  “We were just comparing notes about this morning,” Carlos says, leaning back into his chair. Interesting.

  “Epic, do we know what they stole?” I ask.

  This corner of the break room, like virtually everywhere else in the Spire, has a monitor. Even if I wasn’t wearing my special glasses that projected his text onto my eyes like it was floating in the air in front of me, I could look to the monitor and see what he says.

  Without cracking the NASA or DARPA encryption, we can only rely on the official news… that claims it was a new kind of communications satellite. I doubt the veracity of their statement.

  “Yeah me too, especially considering who we’re looking for,” Kate says.

  “I’m assuming you’re not tracking Luke, or you would tell me, right?” I say. Just the thought of him makes my heart leap into my throat. Where would he go? Where did that dang gem come from?