***
That’s easier said than done considering we’re in the same training squadron — and considering how we train. Commander Dorr is less of an instructor and more of a supervisor; training involves cadets pairing off and learning from one another, with Dorr watching and advising when he deems it necessary.
“How does that even work?” I ask Erisia.
“Rather well, I think,” hye says.
“Everyone who receives the astrarma manifests an inherent skill or two,” Mells says. “I was immediately adept at full-spectrum invisibility. Pardo-En was skilled at gravity manipulation.”
“I could do a little bit of everything, but I wasn’t exceptionally skilled at any one thing,” Erisia says.
And me, I figured out how to fly a couple of days after I received my astrarma. The morning after I encountered Lt. Yx, I found myself looking up at the sky a lot with a vague sense of...yearning, maybe? An impulse to be among the clouds, like I belonged up there and not anchored to the ground. That impulse got stronger by the hour until it drove me to do something that, in retrospect, was totally crazy. I was home — my old home, on Cape Cod — standing on the back deck and staring at the sky, practically hypnotized. I wanted to be up there so badly. It was like a voice in the back of my head was whispering, Higher. You need to go higher.
I went back inside and climbed out of my bedroom window onto the roof. It wasn’t good enough.
Higher.
I climbed up to the top of the roof. It wasn’t good enough.
Higher. You need to go higher.
So I jumped.
I jumped off the roof, my hands outstretched, like I was grabbing for the sun. I never thought about how incredibly stupid that was, how I could so easily fall off the house and break my idiot neck. My conscious mind shut off entirely, and instinct took over. I didn’t realize what had happened until I was thousands of feet off the ground. I glanced down and saw my house, a dot on the landscape, and did what anyone would do in my position: I screamed my throat raw.
And then all the misery and stress and confusion over my parents’ pending divorce I’d bottled up came pouring out of me, transforming my scream into a howl of elation like I’d never experienced before. In that moment, I purged my very soul and left my old life behind, left it on the ground far below me to crumble to dust and blow away. Matt wouldn’t name me for several months after the fact, but I know in my heart that was the moment I became Lightstorm.
Funny thing is, no matter how high I flew, that little voice was always there whispering in my ear: Higher. I eventually learned to ignore it, figuring there was nowhere else to go, but it was always there.
I haven’t heard that voice since I left Earth.
Oh, hey, speaking of training...
“Commander,” Gaartiin says, “I’d like to request Cadet Hauser as my partner for the first session.”
Dorr squints at Gaartiin, then at me. “Granted.”
Gaartiin can’t get down to business fast enough. He wants to learn the Stinging Orbit, and I’m happy to teach him. We take to the air, and I demonstrate the technique a few times, taking care to pelt him with low-power blasts so I don’t hurt him. He almost gets it on the first try, but he misses me as often as he connects. Once he learns how to lead his target (which is tricky because the target is constantly getting knocked around), he nails me every time. Fast learner, this guy.
After my session with Gaartiin, I work with Mells for a while. Mells is an excellent teacher, and within a few minutes, he shows me how to take basic invisibility to the next level and suppress my heat signature so my body temperature matches the ambient air temperature. In return, I show him how to increase his destructive potential. Like me when I first got my powers, he can throw basic heat and concussive blasts but has yet to expand his repertoire much beyond that. I decide to teach him how to machine-gun his attack, like I did the first time I went up against Manticore. He seems to be getting the hang of it when Commander Dorr calls for us to switch partners — and guess who he sticks me with?
“Cadet Hauser, Cadet Grun, you’re together,” he says.
Oh, lovely. And I was having such a good morning.
Grun walks up to me, crosses his arms, looks me up and down, and gives me his best sneer. “I can’t imagine what you could possibly teach me,” he says.
“Manners?” I suggest. “Tell you what. Let’s start by showing each other what we can do and go from there.”
“Basic sparring?” Grun says with a derisive laugh.
“What? You scared I’ll own you?”
The sneer turns into a snarl. It is way too easy to push this guy’s buttons. “I fear nothing.” He looms over me. “Show me what you’re capable of, fargirl.”
For starters, I’m capable of blowing this asshat off his feet with a point-blank concussion blast. Normally, I’d never sucker-punch (or sucker-zap, as the case may be) anyone in a non-combat situation, but if Grun appreciates aggression as much as I’ve been led to believe, he’ll get down on a knee and propose marriage for blowing him halfway across the training field.
Or he’ll get right back to his feet and launch himself at me like a missile. That’s also an option.
I take to the sky. Grun changes course to pursue and starts throwing energy bolts my way, but he’s going for quantity over quality. You know how no-name bad guys in action movies spray machine gun fire like crazy and somehow never hit a thing? That’s Grun. A couple of shots make glancing contact, but most of his barrage zips by harmlessly. To be fair, the near-misses have some serious pepper on them, so at least I know Grun isn’t holding back.
That’s cool. Neither am I.
I give Grun ample opportunity to get me, and he totally blows it. Every attack is a wild volley sprayed in my general direction. His already sucktastic hit-miss ratio gets worse when I start banking, diving, and climbing at erratic intervals. Jeez, this is just plain sad. Has he ever been in a real fight before?
Now, surprisingly, his defensive game is much more on point. I burst out of his attack vector, swing around, and cut loose with a single tight, focused concussion blast that should by all rights knock him into next week. He takes the shot without slowing down or veering off-course. I hit him with some Stinging Orbit action, and he barely flinches. Full-on laser? Shrugs it off. Gravity pulse? Nothing. Foul language would be more effective.
Grun finally gets a good one in. I streak past him on a strafing run, which he doesn’t feel, and he catches me with a close-range shotgun blast that hurts like hell. Worse, it throws me off my game long enough for him to get some solid follow-through shots off. Okay, so he does have a strategy, albeit a kind of crappy strategy: absorb a ton of punishment and set the other guy up for a counterattack. Good to know for next time.
Next time? I’m not finished with this time.
What I do next is, admittedly, ill-advised, but it’s a calculated risk. Sparring with Concorde and fighting Manticore taught me that flyers, as a rule, are distance fighters. Getting in close compromises their offensive and defensive capabilities, and I’m gambling that the rule holds true for my good buddy Grun here. The trick is getting inside his personal space, which brings me to calculated risk the second. The aura Vanguardians generate is by default resistant to energy-based attacks. With a little tweaking, they can become force fields that block physical assaults, but that’s a conscious adjustment. I’m betting Grun hasn’t made that adjustment, and fortunately, this is a training situation, so I have the luxury of trying something as batcrap crazy as flying right at him and, at the very last second, shutting down my powers completely.
And hey, look at that, it works. Grun was ready for supercharged plasma-form Carrie, not normal flesh-and-blood Carrie. I drop onto his back, hitting him with a literal flying tackle, and wrap an arm around his throat — which brings me to calculated risk the third: I don’t know that I am in fact cutting off his air. I’ve learned a thing or two about chokeholds hanging around Natalie and Matt, but it’
s an assumption on my part that I’m constricting an airway. For all I know, Grun breathes through his butthole.
(Oh, ew, gross, why did I go there? Now I’m all skeeved out.)
For the briefest of moments, I revel in the delusion that I’m brilliant. Grun flails for a couple of seconds, trying to shake me loose, then drops into a hell of a power dive. My internal organs threaten to tear loose and take up residence in my feet, I can barely keep my eyes open, and it’s impossible to get a breath in — and that’s when it occurs to me: in his energy form, Grun doesn’t need to breathe. I’m not choking him out; I’m pissing him off. Well, it was a good theory.
I might have an even better one. Ever since I first took to the air, I’ve had an uncanny sense of what Concorde called spatial orientation; I always know where I am in the air, which direction I’m flying, if I’m upside-down, et cetera. It’s a handy talent for aerial combat; I can pull all kinds of crazy maneuvers without getting disoriented. Based on how Grun has always been very careful to keep his belly parallel to the ground throughout our little sparring contest, I’m guessing his sense of spatial orientation might not be so hot. I can work with that.
I power back up and turn Grun’s power dive into a death spiral, spinning him in a tight corkscrew. I let go and let centrifugal force carry me away, then open fire as I fly in a counter-spiral. His shields hold, but he can’t focus well enough to get off an effective counter. Again, we’re at a stalemate.
And so it continues throughout our sparring session. I can’t punch through his defenses, but he can’t figure me out well enough to get me in his crosshairs. It’s a classic brawn versus brains scenario, but neither one of us can claim the advantage.
At last, Commander Dorr calls an end to the session. Grun and I touch down, and I’m honestly stunned he doesn’t go for one last sucker-punch.
“Dishonorable bitch,” Grun pants. He sounds as exhausted as I feel.
“Screw you,” I wheeze.
“Problem, cadet?” Dorr asks Grun.
“She fought dishonorably. We’re supposed to be training in the use of our powers, but she attacked me physically.”
“You want some cheese with that whine, Grun?” I taunt.
Dorr shushes me with a gesture. “You’re correct, Cadet Grun: she did attack you physically. How fortunate for us that the Black End will always fight fairly and with honor, and would never resort to unorthodox methods in order to gain a tactical advantage.”
Ouch. That one was a nine on the Sarcasm-o-meter.
Grun scowls hard and throws an angry glare my way. I shouldn’t respond with a smug smirk, but I do, because I’m all about the high road.
“Two-hour respite,” Dorr says, dismissing us. Oh, thank God.
“Want to ask Grun if he’d like to have lunch with us?” Erisia says.
“Oh, don’t even joke about that,” I say.
“Why would we joke about eating lunch?” Mells says.
“We wouldn’t. Ever,” Pardo-En says. “Come on. I know a place.”
***
Instead of sticking around for some Alliance-issued slurry, we fly to Plaza North, which isn’t that far away from the training commons, but the flight kicks my butt nonetheless.
“Guh. I shouldn’t be this tired,” I say.
“I would be surprised if you were not tired,” Mells says. “You had a rather intense session with Grafton Grun.”
“And that’s on top of the rest of the morning,” Erisia says.
“Yeah, maybe,” I say, but I’m not used to this level of exhaustion. “I don’t know. I thought I could run forever in my energy form.”
“Everything has limits,” Mells says.
“If we were all omnipotent, we would have wiped out the Black End ages ago,” Pardo-En says.
Good point, though that raises a question that’s been sitting in the back of my head ever since I got my powers. “Just how powerful are we, anyway?”
“That is difficult to quantify,” Mells says. “The astrarma allow us to tap and manipulate primal cosmic energies. Those energies are limitless; we are not. As conduits, we have a finite capacity for the energies we channel.”
“Limits.”
“Indeed — and dire consequences for exceeding those limits.”
“Commander Dorr told me that any one of us could unleash enough energy to reduce Kyros City to a crater,” Erisia says, “but we’d destroy ourselves in the process.”
“Imagine trying to force the contents of an entire ocean through a tiny pipe,” Mells says. “Too much pressure and the pipe bursts.”
Oh, fun. So yeah, mental note: don’t go around leveling cities. Done.
“In that analogy, you would be the pipe,” Mells adds.
“Yeah, I think she got that. Standing around jabbering is not getting us lunch,” Pardo-En crabs. “Come on.”
We follow Pardo-En to a little takeout place, a hole-in-the-wall joint with a small window for placing and receiving orders. Erisia recommends the grtschflnt, which I believe is Welsh for meatballs in a spicy sweet-and-sour sauce.
“Good call,” I say. “This stuff is delicious.”
“Best grtschflnt I’ve ever had,” hye says. “It’s a Dantynian specialty. It’s made from —”
“No. Stop. Don’t tell me. Don’t want to know. I don’t want to know what anything I eat actually is. As long as I’m not eating something’s waste, I’m good.”
Erisia sucks air through hyer teeth. “Ooh. I wish you’d said that before I suggested the grtschflnt.”
My throat constricts, which is the only thing that prevents me from expelling my entire stomach onto the sidewalk.
“Joking! I’m joking!” Erisia says, offering me an apologetic look while simultaneously giggling uncontrollably. “Oh, Carrie, I’m sorry, I was joking!”
In a perfectly level, measured voice I say, “I am going to get you for that. I don’t know how or when or where, but I will get you.”
“That’s fair,” Erisia says with a final snort of laughter. “I am sorry.”
“I’m not. Thought I was going to get a show with my meal,” Pardo-En says.
“It appears the show may not be over,” Mells says, directing our attention to two Vanguardians as they come in for a landing.
“Is that General Torr?” Erisia says.
“Yep, and Commander Do,” Pardo-En says, at which point he and the others snap to attention.
“It’s probably too much to hope they’re here for the grtschflnt, huh?” I say.
“Yeah, but it’s not too much to hope that they’re here for you. You’re the one who’s been pissing everyone off lately.”
Gee, thanks.
But he’s not wrong. Commander Do and General Torr walk right up to me. Great. I can’t say this wasn’t unexpected, but still.
“Cadets, take your ease,” General Torr says. My friends relax, but not by much. “Cadet Hauser. A moment of your time?”
We withdraw from the group, moving out of eavesdropping range. Yep, just going to take a casual stroll down the street with the general and the commander. Nothing ominous about that.
“The Council of Generals met this morning,” Torr says, his tone somewhere between casual and conspiratorial, “to discuss the Vanguard’s response to the deaths of Lieutenant Yx and Lieutenant Commander Fast.”
“Response?” I say.
“Two of our Vanguardians died on your world. Although our formal inquiry has cleared your people of any culpability in Yx’s death, the same cannot be said of Lieutenant Commander Fast, and we would be remiss if we did not address the issue appropriately — though there is a considerable difference of opinion among the generals as to what constitutes an appropriate recourse.”
Response. Address the issue. Appropriate recourse. All these polite euphemisms adding up to the same thing.
“You’re considering some kind of military action against Earth, aren’t you?” I say, my temper simmering.
Torr sighs. “One of my fello
w generals has expressed such a desire, yes.”
“General Gretch?”
Torr answers the question by conspicuously not answering the question. “While none of the other generals has openly supported the recommendation, it is now on the table.”
“The council has yet to formally conclude its inquiry,” Commander Do says. “The process may yet be influenced.”
I really should know better than to ask, seeing as the answer somehow always comes around to bite me in the ass, but I ask it anyway. “How?”
“Your world has a right to be heard before the council as part of the inquiry, before any action may be taken,” General Torr says.
“Normally, this would be the responsibility of the member world’s duly-appointed representative,” Commander Do says, “but in light of the fact yours is not a member world, and that you are the only one of your race who is fully apprised of the situation...”
Ow. My ass.
“I can schedule a hearing around your training so you may have a few days to prepare,” Torr says. He adds as an apology, “It’s the best I can do.”
“I don’t see that I have any other choice,” I say.
“Unless you wish to formally withhold comment and trust in the council’s judgment,” Commander Do says.
“Like I said.”
“The commander will act as your liaison with the council,” Torr says. “She will let you know when the hearing has been scheduled, answer any questions you may have about the process...”
I mumble a thank-you as a matter of courtesy, but I don’t mean it, not at all. Inside, I’m seething. I’m terrified. The leadership of a crazy-powerful alien army is talking about invading my home, and I’m the one who has to convince them not to? Yeah, sure, no pressure.
General Torr and Commander Do fly off, and I return to my friends. Naturally, they ask me what happened, but I’m too knotted up to talk about it — or to finish my lunch. I pick up my grtschflnt, stare at it stupidly for a minute, then pass it off to Pardo-En.
I almost hope Commander Dorr pairs me up with Grun again. I have some serious steam to blow off, and I’d be happy to take it out on him.
Action Figures - Issue Seven: The Black End War Page 8
