The Power Broker

by Nick Svolos

  Beside him stood Sledge. Sledge wasn’t smiling. He raised a cupped hand and unleashed a blast of plasma.

  Sandoval evaporated in a cloud of viridescent fire.

  Dawson dodged behind a bank of equipment and I followed suit.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Sledge sang in a mocking tone. I heard another set of elevator doors open behind us. I looked back and saw Professor Polymer enter the room. His arms reached across the room to us, and both Dawson and I were wrapped up tight in rubbery blue-clad arms and suspended in space. Legs kicking at the air, I struggled to free myself, but it was like fighting a giant snake. The arm just wrapped around me tighter.

  “Well done, gentlemen. Thank you,” Dr. Schadenfreude applauded as he stepped forward to inspect his catch. Sledge walked over to poke the small pile of ashes that had once been Sergeant Sandoval with the toe of his boot, grinning with satisfaction. Jezebel staggered out of the elevator car, her mask askew, one hand rubbing a nasty welt on her forehead. She glared daggers at me.

  “Are you alright, liebchen?” the mad scientist asked.

  “I will be in a moment,” she replied, striding with angry purpose in my direction.

  He held up a hand. “Now, now, no need for that. We’re all professionals, here. Besides, I still have a use for our dear Mr. Conway. Professor, if you please.”

  The elastic arm carried me over to the operating table and held me in place while Sledge strapped my arms and legs down. While he fastened a restraint to hold my head, I heard Dawson yell, “You won’t get away with this. We got a message out to the Army. They’re on the way. Don’t make it worse on yourself.”

  Schadenfreude cackled that mad scientist laugh of his. “Captain, were it possible to get a message out without my detecting it, I would merely be amused to observe their futile efforts to gain entrance to this facility. But, of course, you’re bluffing, which I must admit, I also find amusing. Thank you for lightening my mood. Ach, that reminds me, have you found Mr. Conway’s transmitter, Sledge?”

  The blaster took a pause from his work and patted my pockets. “Got it right here, Doc.” He plucked it out and handed it over.

  Schadenfreude gave it a once-over and stuck the device in his pocket, muttering, “Pitiful. A child’s plaything.”

  He then walked over to the table, pulled a penlight out of his pocket and flashed it in my eyes. I winced.

  “Doc, you’re crazy,” I said. “Your plan’s not gonna work. I looked at your research. You haven’t considered enough variations in human DNA. LA’s got people from all over the world, but the people you’ve tested it on are almost all caucasians who’ve been in the country for generations. Your data’s skewed. You don’t know what’s gonna happen when you set the nanobots loose.” Before I could say anything further, Sledge jammed a surgical mouth guard in place and strapped it down.

  “Tsk, tsk, Mr. Conway. Los Angeles’ diversity is what makes it such a perfect testing ground. I thought I explained all of this. Scientific advancement often requires sacrifice. Pity you lack the vision to understand that. Such a waste.” He shook his head sadly and walked away. I couldn’t turn my head to see what he was doing, but I heard him typing away at a keyboard.

  “Do you know the most interesting thing about my nanobots, Mr. Conway? It is their infinite capacity to be reprogrammed for different tasks. One of the more useful programs I have developed is a refinement on the design I used to create Mechanista. Would it surprise you to know that the process did not actually drive her insane? You see, one of the useful side effects of her transformation was that I discovered I could control her. I could exert irresistible influence over her every action. It was I who orchestrated her villainous career. That innocent eighteen-year-old girl was no more responsible for her actions than you will be in a few moments.”

  I tried to shout, but the gag prevented me from spewing the string of invectives I wanted to hurl at him.

  “Oh, I must admit, it was merely curiosity at first. I wished to test the parameters of this new capability I’d discovered in my invention. After that, well, I saw its utility. I was able to ‘retire’ from Omega and rely on my creation to be my catspaw within their ranks. I was most displeased when your little friend Sinfonie took her away from me, but no matter, she had served her purpose. And in a moment, so will you. I will simply inject some nanobots into your bloodstream and reprogram them to exert the same control over you. Now, where did I store that file?” his voice trailed off as he tapped at his keyboard.

  I suddenly realized my mistake and felt like a fool. Rather than try to talk Schadenfreude out of this, I should have blown the lid off his end-game. Sledge and Polymer probably wouldn’t be too happy to learn they were going to lose their powers once this was all done. I cursed into the gag. I’d blown it. The card I needed to play had been in front of me all along, but I’d missed it. A hot tear rolled from the corner of my eye. I’d failed. I’d failed everyone.

  “Ah, here it is,” Schadenfreude cheered. “All set, ja?” I saw him come back into view, holding a syringe full of grey liquid. “Now this might hurt a bit, but it will only last or the rest of your life,” he said with another bout of mad laughter. I struggled against my bonds, but there was no breaking free. After he recovered, the needle descended towards my jugular.

  XIV

  I squirmed, trying to move myself away from the needle. It didn’t help.

  I felt the needle touch the skin on my neck.

  Then he stopped.

  Everything stopped. I could feel the needle lightly touching my throat, see Dr. Schadenfreude’s mad grin frozen on his face. The room was silent.

  I struggled to comprehend what was happening, but I couldn’t. I found I couldn’t even take a breath. My lungs tried to expand, but nothing happened. It was like the air just didn’t want to move. My heart pounded in my chest.

  “Steady, there, kiddo,” I heard a voice say. It sounded strange, all muffled and distorted, like it was coming from under water. Somebody started to unstrap me from the table. “Just stay calm. You can breathe, but take it slow. Like sipping water.”

  I forced down the panic and tried to take a slow breath. It took some effort, but I managed to get some air moving into my lungs. It felt like I was breathing Jell-O. It took another effort to exhale, but by the time my limbs were free, my body started to adjust and get the hang of it.

  I removed the mouthpiece and tried to speak, but only managed a rough whisper. “Who?”

  “In a sec,” he said, and I saw him come into view.

  He was a white man, maybe forty-five years old. He wore one of those wide-brimmed steel helmets, like soldiers wore in World War I. There was something about him, like I should know who this guy was, but it wasn’t coming to me. I saw him carefully reposition Dr. Schadenfreude, putting his arms under his armpits and dragging him away. I started to work on my head restraint and a second later he came back to help.

  “All right, you can sit up now but do it slow, and don’t forget to keep breathing. This gets easier, trust me.”

  I did as instructed. Now, I could get a full view of the man. The WWI theme didn’t stop at the helmet. He was decked out in a full US Marine expeditionary uniform, complete with the strap harness and spats. He even had a M1903 Springfield rifle slung across his back. I really couldn’t believe it, but I thought I knew who he was.

  “Doughboy?” I managed to whisper-bark.

  “Yeah,” he replied with a surprised smile. “Surprised anyone still remembers me.”

  “Read ‘bout you. Supposed to be dead.”

  “Well, I like to think of it as ‘extended duty’. I’ll explain once we’re outta here.”

  “‘K,” I nodded and got up. Moving was weird, kind of like walking in a swimming pool. I went over to where Professor Polymer was holding Dawson. “Gotta free’m,” I croaked.

  “Friend of yours?” Doughboy asked as he drew up next to me.

  I slowly nodded as I started prying the coil
s of Polymer’s arms from Dawson. “Cop. Doc’ll kill ‘im. Or worse.”

  “Alright, keep your shirt on.” He tested the arms, “Wow, he’s got a really good grip on him.” He pulled out a pocket watch. “Stand over here. Now, when I hit this button, it’ll put us back in the time stream. You knock out Blue Boy here, and I’ll freeze everything again.”

  I wanted to ask what “putting us back into the time stream” meant but couldn’t spare the air to do it. I figured, when it happened, it would be self-explanatory. Instead, I just nodded and got into position to give the stretch a nice long nap. Doughboy positioned one hand so it made contact with both Dawson and the villain and set the one holding the watch on my shoulder. “Ready?” he asked.

  I tightened my fist and nodded.

  The Marine pressed down on the button. I threw a haymaker right into Professor Polymer’s skinsuit-covered kisser.

  It was like punching an under-inflated kickball from grade school. The villain’s face wrapped around my fist and he went limp. Dawson fell to the ground with a startled thump. The ambient noise of the lab started up again, and I heard a gasp from behind me.

  Doughboy quickly re-established contact with me and Dawson, clicked the button and I was breathing pea soup again. Dawson started to thrash about, trying to breathe, but the hero calmed him down and walked him through the breathing process like he’d done for me. The old cop recovered quickly and soon we were ready for the next step of whatever Doughboy had planned.

  “Right. We have one stop to steal some equipment, and then we can get out of here.” He walked off towards a door set in the wall opposite the elevator bank. Dawson and I hurried to catch up.

  That turned out to be a mistake. I noticed a burning sensation on my arm and looked down to see my shirt sleeve slowly catch fire. A slow-motion tongue of flame rose from the cloth. I yelped as the pain registered.

  “Whoa, ya gotta slow down,” Doughboy said as he came back to help me pat out the flames. “With time stopped, air friction can be a problem. Just take it easy. Try to move with the flow of the air and don’t make too many sudden movements.”

  Slowly and deliberately, Dawson and I followed Doughboy down the corridor and into a supply room. The Marine searched the shelves and found what he was looking for, a set of the gadgets used to extract and inject Force. He unslung his field pack, wrapped the devices in a spare shirt and secured them in it’s depths.

  While he shrugged the pack back into place, I asked, “What’s the plan?” I noticed that, with practice, it was getting easier to speak. Still, forcing the syrupy air across my vocal cords was painful.

  “We’re gonna need to borrow someone’s powers. I’ll explain once we’re outta here. Let’s get moving.”

  We started down the corridor, heading away from the elevators. I thought the hero might have gotten turned around, and croaked, “Wrong way. Elevators. Back there.”

  Doughboy shook his head. “They won’t work. I got another way out.”

  Sure enough, a little farther down the hall, he stopped and popped a panel out of the wall. He stepped in and started climbing down a ladder mounted on the back wall of an access tube that led downward as far as I could see. Dawson went next, and I forced down a wave of terror and followed after him. The descent turned out to be pretty easy. The air’s syrupy consistency provided a little resistance to my downward progress, billowing up my pants legs and sort of supporting my weight. It took a while, but soon we were down in the motor pool again.

  “I’m going to speed things up a little,” Doughboy said as he adjusted a dial on his pocket watch. “We’ll still be moving too fast for anyone in normal time to see, but it’ll be easier to move and talk.” As advertised, I found my breaths coming much more freely, and the ambient noise of the room, mainly the sound of the air conditioners, sounded like a deep, low-frequency hum.

  “How’d you know about this ladder?” I asked. “It wasn’t on the schematic.”

  “That’s because I erased it from the original drawings about five years ago,” he replied. “The doc put ‘em in while the base was constructed and had his robots fill them in once it was complete. I figured he wouldn’t remember all of them. Lucky for us, he didn’t.”

  “Wow. We should be able to get down to the detention block, then. We got people down there.”

  Doughboy shook his head. “I already got one more passenger than I planned on. Time travel’s hard enough without adding more people to the mix. We gotta git while we can.”

  I responded with my own head shake. “No deal. Did I miss something from all those John Wayne movies? I thought Marines never left a man behind.”

  “He’s right,” Dawson added, his face as grim as death. “We don’t. I just lost one man. I’m not losing any more.”

  Doughboy grimaced, and I knew we’d struck a chord. “You’re a Marine, too?” he asked Dawson.

  “Semper Fi, mac.”

  “Dammit,” he sighed. “Alright, let’s make this quick.”

  After a short climb down the tube, Doughboy did something with his watch to put us back in normal time. We opened the doors, told our compatriots to join hands and he slowed the world down again. We had our hands full for a while teaching everybody how to breathe and move under these strange circumstances. Once everyone had things under control, we made our way back to the motor pool. The soldiers went to arm themselves, while I tried to talk Doughboy into helping us blow the place up.

  “We can’t just leave. By this time tomorrow, Schadenfreude’s going to unleash a nanovirus on the city. When it goes wrong, and I think you know it will, a horde of giant robots is going to kill everyone.”

  “Blowing the reactors doesn’t work. I already tried it.”

  “What?”

  “Time travel. Look, I know you got lotsa questions. I’ll explain later. For now, just trust me when I say we gotta get out of here.”

  I didn’t like it, but sometimes you just have to shut up and let the professionals handle things. We followed Doughboy through a door set in the motor pool wall and found ourselves blinking in the harsh desert sunlight. He led us on a short hike through the desert to a flat area where a small mound of rocks sat waiting. “OK, everybody hold hands, now. We’re gonna go back in time. Not far, just a hundred years or so, but it’s gonna be a little cockamamie, so don’t go bonkers on me. Whatever you do, don’t break physical contact.” Once he was satisfied with our compliance, he made some adjustments to his watch and pressed a button.

  From where I stood, I saw a couple of giant robots emerge from the mountain, walking backwards at high speed, like in a time-lapse video. They reached into the motor pool took out our cars and placed them where we parked them. The scene where we were captured replayed itself in rapid reverse, with backwards-walking robots methodically emerging from the hangar and releasing everyone. I watched myself fly out of the hangar and carefully run backwards up the side of the mountain. We all got into the cars and drove off backwards down the road, vacuuming up dust from the air as we went.

  “Cockamamie” was putting the experience mildly.

  The process accelerated, and the sun rose in the west and fell in the east at a rate that made the whole scene look like it was lit by a strobe light. Rain and storms came upon us and disappeared over the eastern horizon in instants. A loud crashing sound brought my attention back to the mountain, and I just caught the last few rocks rearranging themselves on the mountainside above the open mouth of the abandoned mine. Then the mine wasn’t abandoned anymore, and workers came and went, wearing old-timey workmen’s clothes, while ancient trucks deposited borax into a loader before driving off, backwards and empty.

  Doughboy clicked the button again and we found ourselves standing in the mine’s dirt parking area next to a vehicle under a tarp. The hero pulled the tarp back, revealing a beautiful sight.

  “My God,” I exclaimed. “That’s a ReVere!” She was gorgeous. Chrome-spoked white-walled tires set off a deep red paint job, and as the car�
�s proud owner rolled back the black ragtop, creamy leather seats caught the sun, making my heart leap in my chest.

  “Good eye, Conway. Allow me to introduce Alice. She’s a 1923 ReVere Touring Model. The best Indiana has to offer.” He patted the hood, “Didja miss me, baby?”

  We piled into the amazing machine. It was crowded, but we managed. I wanted nothing more than to open that hood and crawl around in there for a few hours but had to content myself with geeking out over the luxurious details in the dashboard. Doughboy fired up the engine and sped off down what was now a gravel road.

  It was a hot day. Whenever we were, it wasn’t November; and it was a long ride, but I didn’t complain. It gave me a chance to get some questions answered. “I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but how does a guy from your era just happen to show up to literally save my neck in this one?”

  Doughboy chuckled. “Well, it’s a pretty long story, but I guess we got some time to kill. Back in 1928 ... well, not ‘back’ ‘cause we’re in 1919 right now, but you get the picture. Anyhow, I got on the trail of this creep. He murdered some cops in Chicago during a jewel heist and blew town. One of them was a pal of mine, and I couldn’t let the skel get away with it. I finally caught up with him in Los Angeles, but he got the drop on me. Pulls a roscoe and shoots me in the chest. The bullet hits my granddaddy's ol’ watch, which you probably already figured is how I do what I do, and the damn thing shoots me forward in time. The watch shuts down when I try to go someplace I can’t go, like if someone puts a building in my way. It’s handy, otherwise I’d re-enter the timestream inside a rock or something like that and things would be messy. Anyhow, when I came out of it, I found myself in 2029. I didn’t like what I found.”

  “What was it?” Dawson asked.

  “The less I say about the future, the better, Captain. I think the term you folks use is ‘spoilers’. I say the wrong thing, you do something different, and everything gets out of whack. I gotta be real careful not to change things that history doesn’t want changed.