A Hero By Any Other Name

by Stackpole, Michael A.

  A week into the infection, biohazard-suited scientists from a coalition U.S./Mexico task force spotted me on a city street, crawling among and across bodies in the winter sun. The scientists picked me up for study.

  It was lucky for them, for a lot of people, that they did. I was out of my mind with fever, and it took super-prison-grade restraints to hold me, but my body was fighting the infection, producing antibodies like mad. The two national governments harvested, replicated, and distributed those little guys. Tens, maybe hundreds of millions more people survived because I just wouldn’t die, or so they told me when I came to my senses the following summer. After that, I had dreams about syringes full of teeny-tiny bald Anvils charging into infected bloodstreams and beating the crap out of alien invaders.

  The war was over by then, of course.

  Aswar the Darklord was an okay strategist, but he hadn’t known a few things about the Earth.

  Sure, he’d known that on our planet of maybe five billion people there were maybe five thousand maniacs running around in costume, either fighting crime, performing crime, or just showing off. Aswar probably assumed that the ratio of superhumans to normal humans was one to one million. He had his own elite guard of genetically or cybernetically enhanced guys and gals he thought would be our match, especially after the New York-New Jersey firestorm killed so many of us.

  Nah. The actual ratio was, by the best guesses available, more like one super to one thousand normal people. Most folk with superhuman abilities just never revealed the fact. They might lack the range of powers necessary to make a go of it in what was sometimes called the “superhuman arena.” Or they might not want to get beaten up all the time. Or they might consider the costumes and traditions that others of us embraced to be silly.

  Whatever the reason, Aswar’s forces came in, bombed, dropped biological agents, crushed Earth’s ability to respond on a military level ... and they opened the universe’s biggest can of whup-ass.

  An enraged, grieving, unpredictable, informal militia numbering in the millions responded. While I raved and frothed in a restraint bed made by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, heroes, villains, inventors, gods, demons, power armor goons, homemakers with radioactive eye-beams, accountants who could run a four-second mile, cheerleaders who could cast flesh-shriveling spells, and monsters who just wanted to host cooking shows formed up into strike teams. Old enemies shook hands for a wartime truce. Governments let superpowered psychopaths out of prison provided they promised to go Over There and do as much harm as superhumanly possible.

  The costumed forces of vengeance and human survival tore the hell out of Aswar and his armies. I heard later that Aswar was just smart enough, experienced enough, and well-informed enough to understand what hit him. He understood just before he died.

  Then the armies came marching home, leaving behind whole worlds that had once been technologically advanced beyond ours but were now experiencing an Old Stone Age renaissance. Our supers came back with war brides and war husbands from liberated worlds, with new technologies, with a new awareness that if humankind stayed only on Earth, it would invite extinction.

  Aswar the Darklord became the unacknowledged, unknowing instigator of the Terran Diaspora. None of Earth’s colony worlds were named after him, but he was responsible in part for the establishment of every one, both in our reality and in the Chaos Zone.

  Nor did the sudden depletion of the numbers of Earth’s supers result in a rise in crime. Lots of costumed felons had earned clean records fighting in the war and a surprising number of them stayed clean afterward. Some people had turned to crime in the old days because of a lack of opportunity or challenges suited to their skills on Earth; now they found their outlets in space.

  Meanwhile, I was wandering. I never got my full strength back. Earth didn’t need Anvil, except as a guy people would buy drinks for because he’d been the source of the Juarez Plague vaccine. For more than twenty years I was the world’s toughest itinerant handyman, jackleg mechanic, line cook, and truck driver, but usually I operating a wrecker in high-danger environments. Sometimes I worked off-world, whatever it took to keep four walls around me at night and get me through the day.

  A couple of years back, I accepted, for no particular reason but boredom, a year-long contract from t’Darthesin Robotics here on the colony world of Black Forest. When my year was up, I failed to go back. I had no urgent reason to return, really; I’d get around to it. The planetary government, like most colony-world administrations, was pretty easy-going about such things.

  And, yeah, I volunteered for RTRDS, the Rescue & Transport Rapid Deployment Service. “Retreads,” we were called by nicer citizens on various worlds, “retards” by others. You know how people are.

  So here I was, still trying to keep ahead of the images of two million bodies lying in homes and in the streets, in hospitals and converted gymnasiums serving as wards. Being cremated, the identities of many of them not ever known, as a measure to arrest the spread of the disease. Ricky’s body was never identified. He didn’t carry his driver’s license when running around as Toro Negro.

  And now I knew why Dita’s doll with its floppy arms and legs wouldn’t leave my thoughts. It was another body in the streets.

  “You all right?” Hathor’s voice pulled me back out of my half-sleep.

  I opened my eyes. She was seated next to me on the bank, her helmet and rebreather off. Her fire suit was unsealed from neck to waist. Beneath it was a faded blue T-shirt, the words “Cedar Grove Saints” and a fleur-de-lis silk-screened on it in white.

  I rubbed my eyes. “Never better.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Conrad, mud-caked up to his knees but looking a little more energetic, loped up to us. “Ten minutes are up. Time to get going.”

  “Yeah.” I heaved myself to my feet. “Before today is done, I aim to give a little girl her dolly back.” I extended a hand to Hathor. She took it and I helped her to her feet.

  “I think we’re going to have to finish this on our own.” Conrad stared north as if calculating the distance to the settlers. “I listened to the radio for a while. Nothing but static. I doubt we can even reach the main office or the emergency services to get help.”

  I paused at the top of the bank and stared at him. “Wait. What?”

  “Just static on the radio, Mike.”

  “No traffic at all? Did you listen to any frequencies but ours?”

  “Of course I did.”

  I donned my helmet and used my chin to activate the radio setup. I also closed my visor so my voice wouldn’t carry. “Vox on.”

  “Voice interface active.” The voice in my ears startled me a little. I recognized it—the distinctive silky tones of actress Stacey Banks, on whom I’d had a major crush when I was a teenager. I’d heard that she’d lent her voice to GPS systems and computer voice interfaces, but I wasn’t ready for her suddenly to show up in my helmet. I shoved that thought aside. “Scan radio frequencies for signal.”

  “Scanning ... Broadcast frequencies found.”

  “Cycle between them, in decreasing order of signal strength, at two-second intervals.”

  The static returned. It ran for two seconds, then skipped for a barely detectable moment, then returned.

  For two seconds. Skip. Static. Skip. Static.

  “Kill last process.” The static faded. Thoughtful, I raised my visor again.

  “What is it?” Hathor’s voice was hushed.

  I gestured for her and Conrad to step in close, then I spoke to them in a whisper. “Conrad couldn’t hear anything on his radio because we’re being jammed. There was no broad-based jamming going on when we landed—the pilot would have reported it. And a really powerful jamming unit would draw the military to it. We may be closer to Mister Big than we thought.”

  Conrad scratched at his chin. “Or we picked up some sort of pursuit between the settlement and here. I’ve heard some odd things I couldn’t really imagine being caused by the fire, but I had n
o reason to think they were caused by anything else.”

  I sighed. “You should have mentioned that.”

  Hathor shot me a look of reproach. I gritted my teeth. Yeah, there were things maybe I should have mentioned, too. And damn all psychics for being able to sense stuff like that.

  But she just said, “So what do we do?”

  “We triangulate to find the source of the jamming. But if Conrad’s right, we could be under direct observation, and we don’t want to tip them off. Conrad, can your walkie-talkie thing do direction finding for a signal source?”

  He shook his head.

  Trying to look unconcerned, I set my pack down and began rooting through it. “But you do know how to do it, right? And Hathor, you, too?”

  Both nodded. Hathor sealed up her suit and donned her helmet.

  I pulled the field radio out of my pack. A good, up-to-date unit, it looked like an oversized laptop computer with a hardened aluminum case. “Conrad, you’re on this radio. You stay here with it. Hathor, you move east toward the treeline like you’re looking for a place to pee. I’ll move north. In exactly one minute, we all stretch like we’re tired ... and point toward the signal source with one hand. Make it look natural.”

  “Got it.” Hathor headed east.

  I went north. Ambling, not making much speed, I counted off sixty seconds while orally programming my radio again. “Vox on.”

  “Voice interface active.”

  “Scan for radio signals. Lock onto the strongest signal. Report bearing to signal source. Initiate.”

  “Signal source bearing south forty-eight degrees east, plus or minus three degrees.”

  “I—oh, crap.” I realized I had no idea what my own exact orientation was—and “roughly north” wasn’t good enough.

  “Please repeat. Instruction not understood.”

  I slapped my visor down. “Show my bearing on the heads-up display. Update constantly.”

  A transparent green horizontal bar appeared on the visor, down near the bottom, with short vertical cross-bars at intervals, a number atop every tenth bar—every ten compass degrees. I was facing north 7º east. I stopped where I was and turned counterclockwise until I was staring straight toward south 42º west, basically at a right angle to the direction of that signal source.

  I did what I hoped was a credible imitation of a guy stretching tired muscles—and ended up pointing, more or less innocuously, at the unseen enemy with my left hand.

  Of course, then I had to turn some more to see what the others were doing, since the damned helmet wouldn’t let me turn my head far enough to see. I kept my left arm pointed toward the signal source.

  Conrad sat back where I’d left him, facing due north and stretching. The line suggested by his right arm intersected the one suggested by my left near the treeline.

  Near Hathor, in fact. She stood just two steps from a big fern-like bush that marked the intersection. In mid-stretch, she pointed straight toward it with her left arm. As she glanced around and realized what we were indicating, a look of surprise, the first strong emotion I’d seen on her, crossed her features.

  Then she lunged toward the ferns. I began lumbering in that direction. Conrad sprang toward the spot.

  Hathor plunged into the bush and disappeared from sight. The ferns thrashed as if she and an enemy were dueling with leaf-blowers. Then a silvery cylinder, maybe a yard across and a foot and a half thick, with ridged indentations all around the rim like a very thick quarter coin, shot up from within the bush. Spindly waldos tucked in tight against its underside and a ring of eight cameras circling its top rim gave it the semblance of an alien creature with arms and eyes. It hurtled into the open air away from the trees, Hathor in fast pursuit.

  The cylinder angled away from the onrushing Conrad and toward the creek. It climbed only to about four yards in the air.

  Conrad turned after it, a 90º vector at full running speed, his feet flinging hunks of forest floor as he maneuvered. He changed directions the instant the cylinder did, leaping at it, swatting, growling like he was about to eviscerate a home intruder. The cylinder, nimble in flight, dodged right and left, but lost much of its air speed as it did. Bounding back and forth over the creek in pursuit, missing the cylinder or sometimes just scraping it with his nails, Conrad moved faster than anyone I’d ever seen who wasn’t a super-speedster.

  I was thinking as I ran. The fact that the cylinder never rose above twelve feet in altitude meant it was an antigrav unit with a very limited ceiling of operations. That, in turn, suggested it was an old design, or was put together by someone on a budget, or both.

  The cylinder managed to veer one way while Conrad was jumping the other. As he landed, recovering his balance, it accelerated and zipped toward the trees, gaining ground on Conrad.

  Then, for no reason I could see, it vectored straight into a tree, crumpling a fist-sized portion of its upper rim, shattering a camera there. It bounced off, lost altitude. Conrad, catching up to it, swatted it straight into the ground. It lay there inert.

  Conrad stood over it, panting and growling deep in his throat, but it didn’t move again.

  I slowed my run and raised my visor. “Hathor, that tree thing—that was you?”

  She nodded and stopped where she was to breathe.

  Conrad picked up the inert cylinder, his effort suggesting that it was pretty heavy, and headed back toward the field radio. Hathor joined him.

  As I got there, Conrad’s fur rose again. He held the cylinder over his head and threw it toward the creek bottom.

  It was only six feet or so from us when it went off. As it hurtled into the mud, it erupted in glowing spikes of purple-white energy, like what you get when you accidentally microwave metal foil, ruining the oven.

  And then those bright purply spikes of lightning were inside my helmet.

  I managed to get the helmet off without breaking it, though my instinct was to tear it in pieces from my head. More electrical spikes crawled across the surface of my heat suit and shot out of my backpack, the latter spikes long enough for me to see them at the edges of my vision. I felt electricity play across my body. I’m pretty sure I was hopping around as if I’d been asked to invent a dance in honor of bug-zappers. I tore the pack off, to the detriment of its front cross-strap.

  All that time, I think Hathor and Conrad were shouting, but I couldn’t really hear them over all the cursing I was doing in Spanish.

  A moment later it was over. Hathor had her helmet off, no burn marks evident on her. Conrad had yanked his walkie-talkie and a couple of pouches free from his suspenders and flung them away; he had one spot of burned fur at his left collarbone. The field radio was on fire, burning briskly.

  Scowling, I helped the other two up. “Electromagnetic pulse.”

  “No kidding.” Conrad, still puffed up, started pacing. “I heard an electronic whine start up inside it as I was holding it. I thought, a bomb. It was playing opossum until we were close enough for the beam to affect us all. I’m an idiot.”

  Brushing forest mulch from her fire suit, Hathor reassured him, “You’re not an idiot. But it’s ‘playing possum.’ The first ‘o’ goes away.”

  “Don’t correct my English. I speak very good English. I hate English.” Agitated, trembling like he’d had his teeth on a bird but it had gotten away, he continued pacing. “And now all our electronics are wrecked. Aren’t they? Radios, computers, your rebreathers?”

  I could see thin little streams of gray smoke drifting out of my helmet and Hathor’s. “Yeah, the electronics are gone. But maybe not the rebreathers.” I took off my gloves and rebreather, and then pulled open a plate inset in the surface of the rebreather that normally rests against the wearer’s back.

  The circuit board beneath it was charred, but beside it, a sturdy metal master switch and the heavy wiring that led from it looked only like they’d seen some heat. I yanked the circuit board free and discarded it, then flipped the switch from “data” to “manual.” Then I pre
ssed the “on” button at the top of the unit.

  The rebreather coughed once then hummed into life. I grinned and switched it off again.

  And I explained. “Firemen, divers, hazardous-environment guys ... nobody really trusts circuits on emergency equipment. Not with hacker bad guys willing to find a back door in and kill you. So these things are engineered so you can dispense with the computer controls and go manual. Hathor, I’ll show you how.” And I did.

  Then I slid down into the creek, retrieved the silver cylinder, and brought it back. I tore the top metal surface off like I was opening a giant can of chili and looked at its insides.

  Calming down, Conrad kept his eye on the north. “Whoever Mister Big is, he’ll know we’re coming.”

  Her air flow manually set to her own satisfaction, Hathor powered down her rebreather. “Maybe not. The cylinder was jamming a broad range of radio frequencies. It probably couldn’t transmit over its own jamming. Mike, did it have any alternate way to transmit? Microwaves or something?”

  “Doesn’t look like it.” I studied the cylinder’s innards. Most of its interior had been taken up by a high-end battery; the device used a lot of energy. There was an antigrav unit not much stronger than was needed to get it off the ground, a magnetic drive for silent propulsion, computer circuitry, camera feeds, radio circuitry, the EMP beam weapon, a capacitor to give the EMP device one good shot and to blow out the device’s own computer when it was triggered. “This couldn’t have been the gizmo that wiped out the electronics in town. It’s too small, its beam to limited.”

  Then I realized that, though I didn’t recognize this exact design, I recognized some of its components. I’d studied them in years past, an issue of family research. This was Vulcan legacy technology. My cousin Rudy’s Carnelian armor had a power system and antigrav like this.

  Conrad sighed. “Whether they know we’re coming or not, it’s time to go.”