The endgame is calling: ready or not, here it comes.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Engines screaming, the jet pushes off in a cloud of dust and heaves itself into the sky. Inside, Codex is handing out more antisuppression field amulets. It looks like he got a deal on cheapo trinkets at a discount store, because they’re all pewter crescent moons or unicorns or stars. There’s some long explanation about the Laws of Similarity and Contagion that I don’t really follow, the important part being that they are duplicates of the sympathetic charm he made for me to wear when I was in jail. With these charms on, Sovereign can’t shut our superpowers down. Doc stopped glitching out when she put one on, and now there are three or four of them glued to the computers that run the tilt-engine. The best part is Charlie figured out a way to reverse the protective effect with a simple act of symbolism—when worn under our clothes, they protect us from the power suppression field, but when the chain the charms are hung on is used to tie someone up, they can nullify powers just like Garrison, even if they would otherwise be immune to it. We all take three or four and stash them away.
“Legion One to ground, we have taken off,” says one of the Docs from the pilot’s seat. She, like her duplicates, is decked out for battle. “Our altitude will be nape-of-the-earth until we are over the Pacific, how copy?”
“Negative, pilot! That call sign has been deactivated pending review,” snaps an audibly shaken ground controller. “Return to ground immediately! I don’t know who you are, but you need to file a flight plan like everyone else.”
“Sure thing, buddy,” grumbles Doc. Her hand flies over the console, creates with a few tapping motions a crisp manga-styled drawing of herself giving the viewer the finger before attaching it to an email and sending it to the New Port International air traffic controllers. Then the Doc sitting in the copilot’s seat switches the radio off. No way we’re wasting any time on paperwork. No way. People are dying.
• • •
Other than a brief snap of relief and a tight hug, Sarah and I didn’t have much time to check in with each other before Calamity took charge and ordered everyone into the jet for an immediate takeoff. Doc had barely finished debugging the more advanced hypertech components inside before we were pushing out of the hangar and into the sky. Garrison’s moving fast, so we need to move faster. Even now, Calamity’s head-down with a tablet, trying to work out a plan of attack alongside the third Doc with a few muttered remarks, some poking at the screen.
The tilt-engine jumps and bumps with the micromaneuvers necessary to keep us close to the ground and out of the way of civilian air traffic. The guns strapped to the ceiling in crash webbing rock back and forth with the motion, sort of a dull, clicking wind chime. The cabin feels like part military gunship, part business jet. Somewhere in the back, in the open-plan cargo section behind the seating area, Kinetiq is doing something with a can of spray-paint. Charging off to save the world never quite looks the way you expect it to.
Curled up in a leather seat, watching the world snap by at four hundred miles an hour just a few dozen feet below us, I struggle to get back into the mindset of Dreadnought. All I can think about is that courtroom. The shock on their faces. How terrified they were of me. And how much I had enjoyed doing the thing that scared them so much.
I’m a horrible person. The world shouldn’t have to rely on someone like me. They deserve better.
“Look, I’m not really comfortable getting that close to MANPAD Island again,” says Doc, pointing at something on the tablet she’s sharing with Calamity.
Calamity rubs her nose with frustration. “Well if the EMP doesn’t work, we’re going to need to insert somehow, so…”
They quietly go round and round, proposing and rejecting a half-dozen different plans. That’s what does it, that’s what fixes me. During the handful of seconds we had together before we piled into the tilt-engine, Sarah told me that her mother was walking across the house when the power suppression field slammed down; she’s currently stuck halfway through a wall, still alive, but in agony. Even as worried about her mom as she is, Calamity is still doing her job. If she can suck it up and keep going, then so can I. People are dying. This isn’t the time to mope.
I am Dreadnought. I am undefeatable. They came after me because I’m the one who scares them. Because they knew I was the most dangerous. Well, they were right, and I’m going to prove it to them. A smile grows on my face. Tomorrow…tomorrow I might retire. Take my savings and buy a little cabin out somewhere, hide away from the world so I can’t hurt anybody. But today?
Today I’m going to beat some motherfuckers ’til they cry.
We reach the coast, a strip of rocky beach flashing beneath us, there and gone. Pilot-Doc pulls back on the yoke and kicks on the afterburners. A thundering climb brings us up to altitude and speed before she pulls us into a sharp left turn to head south toward the waters off of California.
“Do you guys have a plan so far?” I ask.
“Circling in on one,” says Calamity, not looking up.
Doc nods. “With the intel we have, I think this is as good as it’s going to get.”
“All right. Gather ’round partners, we gotta have a chat.” Calamity sets the tablet down in the center of the floor, and we all lean in to look. Codex looks up from the grimoire he was studying, and Kinetiq climbs back up from the cargo section, refastening their ballistic armor as they go. Their vest has a thin, cardboard stencil taped to the front now, covered over in yellow spray paint.
“You will not be getting any of that paint on the leather,” says Doc with narrow eyes. Kinetiq smiles and makes a big show of their clean hands.
“Knock it off, we’ve got business to discuss,” says Calamity. “With Doc’s help I bugged Cynosure last time I was down there.” I have a flash of memory of her tossing handfuls of mechanical roaches as we ran from Garrison’s goons. “Good news is, we’ve got a notion about where the ritual room is.”
She taps an icon and brings up a grainy black-and-white image of a miniature indoor Stonehenge that looks like it was taken from inside a ventilation duct. In a separate window, aerial photographs of Cynosure have a red circle highlighting where the spell room is—deep in the heart of the big mansion suspended between the three towers, it seems.
“Bad news is they’ve stepped up security since our last visit.” Calamity taps another icon and more windows pop open, showing heavily armed and armored figures patrolling walkways, guarding doors. “By our count they’ve got at least sixty goons in full gear.”
“We’ve IDed them as heavy response teams from a private military contractor called Silver Mountain,” says Doc. “All of Silver Mountain’s heavy response teams, in fact. These guys are bad news. Lots of ex-Delta Force operators, former SAS, French GIGN, so on and yada yada. They do a lot of work in Mexico and parts south; really anywhere people are shooting but the media isn’t covering. They’re not going to do much against our heavyweights, but myself, Calamity, and Codex really need to take them seriously.”
“So what do they have that could be a problem for Dreadnought and me?” asks Kinetiq.
“Tough to say,” replies Calamity. “Princess Panzer has been pretty aggressive about setting up defenses. She’s installing and reconfiguring new automated weapons systems by the hour. ’Course she’s got the attention span of a goldfish, so most of them don’t stick around for much longer than an hour, but that only means we don’t know what to expect. It’s hard to tell what her gear does, but we had best be wary.
“As for the rest of his metahuman staff,” she continues, “Thunderbolt’s still in the penalty box from last time we paid these fellas a visit—” Another grainy photo, this one of Thunderbolt on a bed in Cynosure’s infirmary. Kinetiq grunts with satisfaction. “—or at least he was until about fourteen hours ago when they wheeled him out to parts unknown. Graywytch was pretty messed up last time we danced, but we haven’t had eyes on her since we rustled her grimoire. Codex says she could do he
r part of the game from a long way away if she had to, but isn’t in any shape to fight right now. And Red Steel should still be in the hospital.”
“If he’s not, he promised not to interfere as long as I didn’t go after the satellites again,” I say.
Calamity looks up, surprised. “You’ve been talking to him?”
I nod. “As far as killers-for-hire go, he seems pretty nice.”
“The shit you get up to,” says Calamity with a chuckle. “Anyhow, we know for sure we’re going up against Panzer, and if Garrison hired Red Steel, he might have hired more free agents to bolster his Silver Mountain troops.”
Codex speaks up. “Are we sure about that?”
“We haven’t seen any,” says Doc, “But Cynosure has some powerful counter-surveillance equipment, and my roachcams are programmed to self-destruct to avoid detection so we’ve only got three or four left. And we can’t discount the possibility that they’ve brought in more metahuman mercenaries.”
“Let them. It won’t help,” says Kinetiq. They touch a finger to the painted stencil on their armor’s chest piece and find it dry enough to peel off. Big yellow block letters read EAT THE RICH.
“The worst part is they’ve got about thirty civilians on hand, who look to be Garrison’s mundane employees,” says Doc. “Cooks, mechanics, maids, that sort of thing. They’re not tied up and wired with bombs or anything, but it does mean we can’t just pull back and shell the whole island with plasma bursts if things get too hot. We’re going to need to get in close and check our targets. Indications are they’ll go to ground in panic rooms, but watch your fire all the same.”
“So we’re fighting an unknown number supervillains, and we’ve got to pull our punches because they’ve got human shields, that about the size of it?” asks Kinetiq.
Doc nods. “That’s why we get paid the big bucks.”
“Speak for yourself,” says Kinetiq. “I’m a stringer.”
Codex speaks up. “And my allowance is crap.”
“Hell, I do it for free,” says Calamity.
Doc and I trade a look. “Man, you guys are getting screwed,” I say. There are a few chuckles, a little bleeding of tension.
“All right, the plan is simple enough,” says Calamity. “Step one, we hit them with an electromagnetic pulse. It probably won’t work but it’s worth a try. Step two, Dreadnought goes in first and draws as much fire as she can. Kinetiq, you’re up high behind her, doing that mirage trick you showed me. Drop the hammer on Panzer’s gun emplacements as they reveal themselves. Doc can provide long-range fire with this here particle cannon as needed. Wreck up their heavyweights as good as you can, brush off their tactical goons, and signal us when you’ve got control of the mansion. We’ll drop in once it’s clear; I’ll pull security for Codex while he does his thing and kills the spells. Then we rig the ritual room with C4 and blow it all to hell. Doc’ll be ransacking their hard drives at the same time, and we leave with enough evidence to put them all in Yucca Mountain for the rest of their lives.” She looks at each one of us. “Anyone got a better notion, now’s the time to say it.”
“I notice that plan only really talks about Panzer,” says Codex.
“Dreadnought and Kinetiq will improvise if she’s got serious backup,” says Doc. “Without more intel that’s all we can do.”
Codex doesn’t look happy, but he nods his assent.
“Listen,” says Calamity, “I know it’s cheesy to go on about freedom and democracy and all that noise. God knows I’m an ornery, cynical cuss when it comes to that sort of talk. But that is what we stand to lose here today. Garrison said it straight out—he wants to end equality. He wants to kill democracy. His world is a world of blackcape dictatorships. If he gets a monopoly on superpowers, nobody will be able to stand up to him. Nobody. We don’t win today, our grandkids won’t even know what voting was.” Her eyes get hard. “We win this fight, end of story. Dying’s fine, but we ain’t losing. Anyone got a problem with that?”
Nobody does.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Our first inkling that this fight isn’t going to go as planned is when Princess Panzer shoots us out of the sky. The Doc in the pilot’s seat shouts in alarm a half-second before her upper body gets mulched into gloopy, white android gore by an antiaircraft cannon. A hypersonic slug punches through the glass canopy, tears out the back of her seat, and blasts right through the cabin and out the back of the tilt engine. The exit hole in the rear of the cabin is about nine inches to the left of Calamity’s head. The blast pressure of the round combines with an explosive decompression to suck every lungful of oxygen out of the jet as the whole thing wobbles and noses over toward the ocean. An instant cacophony of alarms and sirens is all but drowned under the roaring of the wind, but I can still hear the two surviving Docs shouting at me to get out of the jet and into the fight. Everyone else is stunned unconscious or headed that way. We’re still twenty minutes out with the counter-radar running at full power—we weren’t expecting to make contact yet.
Even now, I sometimes freeze up at the start of a fight, and this one has begun so abruptly I have to force myself to get out of my chair and start heading back to the sliding doors. From a long way away I note that Calamity is pale, slouched in her seat, blinking slowly as I step across her to the cargo area. She’s bleeding freely from one ear. Codex is flexing his fingers like they’re new to him, like they’re the most important thing he can think of. We’re all a little shell-shocked, and so for some reason I fixate on Kinetiq’s spray paint bottle rolling across the floor as the jet’s dive grows steeper. When I haul open the door and that icy wind hits me like a punch in the mouth, I snap out of it quick. The tilt-engine is trailing a thick line of black smoke and beginning to roll onto its back. I slam the door behind me.
Just as I’m about to grab the wing and set it right, a flare in the lattice warns me of another incoming round. With a burst of speed, I get out in front of the jet and guard my face with my arms. The sabot round clips off my shoulder like a chisel from God, a radiating burst of pain that makes me gasp in surprise. It continues past me and blows the wingtip clean off—better than another round in the cabin, at least.
“Get the jet back in the air!” I shout through my comm link as I power down hard to where the shots are coming from. The ocean is miles below, a glimmering steel floor waiting to greet us at terminal velocity.
“Flameouts in both engines! Avionics are gone!” says Doc. “Hydraulics are gone!”
Between shepherding the tilt-engine to a safe water landing and taking out Panzer, I’ve got to leave something important undone. Without time to think, I choose to take the fight to the enemy and leave the rest of my team on their own for now. At this altitude, Doc should have enough time to figure something out before they smash into the ocean. That’s what I tell myself as I’m passing through the sound barrier, twisting up and out of the way of another round aimed right at my nose. It tears a clean hole through my cape and continues on into empty sky.
As I close the distance, Princess Panzer comes into view. She’s standing on some kind of gleaming, silver platform that hangs in midair. Next to her is a long-barreled cannon chased with gold filigree and cranked way up on a gimbal to trace my flight path. Sensor bulbs glitter like gems as they fix and refix my position. It fires, and though the range is shorter now almost by half, I still have enough time to twist away before impact. Panzer really is just a little kid, I guess. She should be shooting at the jet so I’d have to let myself get hit, but I guess she’s not that thoughtful in her tactics yet. Lucky me.
What she lacks in strategy, Princess Panzer tries to make up for with pure aggression. She throws out her arm in a dramatic gesture of command, and her cannon glows with an eerie inner light before refolding itself into a triple-barreled chain gun that immediately begins vomiting tracers at me. Panzer sprays the sky, puts up far too much lead for me to dodge away from all of them, and the ones that connect hit like stinging hammers. Already the t
ender spots from a week of bad fighting are waking up, registering complaints.
With a wrenching twist, I throw my course down toward the deck as hard as I can and put every ounce of focus into clearing Panzer’s line of fire. A blizzard of yellow tracers follows me down. Arms pressed tight to my sides, I overshoot the platform before porpoise-twisting back up to come at her from below. She’s just reconfiguring her platform to let the gimbal track down that low when I smash into it from underneath and upend the whole damn thing in a shower of broken silver and smashed components.
Up close like this, I can sense her personal force field generator going into overdrive as shrapnel spangs and bounces off her as she falls, arms windmilling with some desperate, useless reflex. That’s why I have no hesitation whatsoever about kicking her in the head as hard as I can. Princess Panzer rockets away from me and down to the waves, cartwheeling into a series of tall white splashes across the surface of the ocean.
I should go down and finish it. Get to grips with Panzer and smash whatever hypertech gizmo is giving her all this artillery, or if it’s something innate, try out Codex’s magic handcuffs. That’s the smart play. But when I look up, the tilt-engine is still nose-diving back to Earth, a noxious ribbon of smoke behind it.
Sarah is on that plane.
“Legion One, I’m coming to get you,” I say into the radio and hope I’m making the right call. Taking a deep breath for focus, I reverse course and blast into the sky.
“The jet’s toast, we’ve got to bail,” says Doc.
“Nothin’ doin’!” snaps Calamity, and my heart nearly pops with relief. “We ain’t dead yet!”
Sovereign Page 26
