A Hero By Any Other Name

by Stackpole, Michael A.

  Except I dodged and he hit me anyway,

  I’ll tell you a secret. No guy with innate powers, like me, ever wants to acknowledge that some armor-wearing creep is his equal. But the truth is that someone with innate power only gets more effective very slowly, usually through training and experience. He only gets stronger with conditioning and maybe luck. Power armor goons, on the other hand, can get more powerful whenever they develop or run into a more effective cybernetics system. The ones with a lot of money can upgrade themselves several times a year. Hell, for all I know they belong to a subscription service, the Gizmo of the Month Club.

  So, no, Sethlans wasn’t my equal. He beat the holy crap out of me.

  Suddenly I was being slammed into the ground, into rocks, into trees. Most everything I was slammed into broke under the impact. My helmet and rebreather just vanished into fragments.

  One time when I was thrown into a sturdy tree it didn’t break, but Sethlans’ igniter weapon hit the ground nearby. The weapon fired, pouring energy into the trees to my left. Recoil or the effect of air superheating right in front of it caused it to spin clockwise. I lunged for it to destroy it—that would make this a win for Hathor and Conrad, even if I ended up dead—but Sethlans yanked me away before I could get my hands on it. Then I was flying around inside the food processor of the gods again.

  I think I lasted about thirty seconds. In that time, the beam from the spinning igniter played across both of us twice, not hurting either of us. At the end of those thirty seconds, I was flat on my back, my suit shredded. Sethlans knelt on top of me, his hands around my neck.

  Squeezing.

  There hadn’t been enough time for Conrad and Hathor to get the settlers away. In a minute, once I was dead, Sethlans would pick up his igniter and resume his task of herding the settlers to their deaths. He’d just have to do it on foot. I gripped his wrists but couldn’t budge them.

  I grayed out.

  The last thing I saw was Sethlans’ serene, perfect features.

  And a dim, distant image of Dita’s beloved Mexican folk-dancer doll hanging limp in Conrad’s hand. No, lying on a Juarez street, surrounded by millions of broken dolls just like it.

  By touch, I got my hands around Sethlans’ neck. I didn’t push. I yanked. He wasn’t expecting that; his elbows weren’t locked. I pulled his head to mine, butting him forehead to forehead. Stars shot through my grayed-out vision.

  Sethlans’ hands came loose from my throat.

  Yeah, I’d been weaker ever since Juarez, but I’d never become less durable. And nobody wants to head-butt an anvil.

  I felt him push off from me, begin to crawl away.

  No. I crawled after him, felt his trailing leg under my outstretched hand. I lunged forward. I aimed a punch where I knew his back would be, and felt metal crumple under my fist.

  I still couldn’t see. The grayness and lightshow were retreating, but swirling flame was taking their place, making a fractal abstract painting of my surroundings. The roaring in my ears from asphyxiation was being replaced by the roaring from burning trees. The ignition beam washed across us again.

  I realized I was talking. Shouting. I didn’t mean to. The words just came pouring out. “They just want a place.” I slammed his spine again, felt him sag against the burning earth. “They just want a home.”

  He yanked himself forward. I scrambled on hands and knees after him, felt my hands encounter something, grabbed his leg again.

  “They just want to live.” I stood and yanked Sethlans off the ground over my head, then swung him to the ground on the other side of me. He smashed into the rocky soil, scattering burning underbrush, sending fiery leaves and cinders into my face.

  There was a taptree beside me, four feet thick. “Let ... them ... live.” I swung Sethlans into the tree trunk. I saw it snap, chopped through as if Sethlans were a giant axe blade. The tree fell away, crashing into the burning branches of others behind it.

  More trees. I swung Sethlans into the next, smashing the trunk, and the next, and the next.

  Then I was really tired, and it occurred to me that Sethlans wasn’t writhing any more. I dropped my enemy to the ground beside me.

  Ten yards away, visible only when wind carried sheeting flame away for a moment, the igniter weapon continued to spin. I stumbled over to it, stepped on it, crushing it. It stopped firing, stopped spinning.

  I needed to breathe, but there was fire all around me. The heat wouldn’t hurt my lung tissue, but the smoke would choke me, the lack of oxygen would asphyxiate me. I held my breath, but I couldn’t do that for more than a few more seconds.

  I staggered back to Sethlans and gave him a look. His power armor was shattered, most of it gone, just some leg and waist portions left. If he had an air supply, it would be in fragments now. The guy was Caucasian flesh-colored and had brown hair. Blood poured out of his mouth and flowed onto the leaves and embers of the forest floor. His arms and legs lay at odd angles.

  Then his hair burst into flame. His skin darkened, blackened, as the heat of the fire around us consumed it.

  There was nothing around me but flame and death as far as I could see and I needed to breathe. It occurred to me that I was about to pass out. I was going to die here.

  Well ... maybe that was all right. I’d outlived my costumed career, my city, my family by a quarter century. Tears for those losses, tears that hadn’t come in all those years, dropped onto my cheeks. But at least I’d had one last good run.

  Tears on my cheeks. But they weren’t sizzling to nothingness. My surface temperature had to be three or four hundred degrees, didn’t it?

  Cautiously, I raised my head and took a shallow, shallow breath.

  Yeah, the air was hot, but not choking, not oxygen-starved. I immediately felt better. I greedily gulped some more.

  I looked around again and raised my voice. “Hathor?”

  Here. It was Hathor’s voice, somehow separate from the burn roar around me, like voice-over narration in a movie. I can see you in my mind, I can see your surroundings, but I don’t know where you are relative to me.

  I began calling her name, shouting as loudly as I could.

  A minute later she trotted out from between two burning taptrees, brushing flaming embers from her, and looked me in the eye.

  I couldn’t quite keep a grin off my face. “You’ve been supplying me with air, haven’t you? With your telekinetic ability.”

  “Rookie, I’ve been giving us all air since we first entered the treeline.” Her voice was hollow, hard to hear behind her visor. “Mostly for Conrad.” She looked at the mess that was Sethlans on the ground. I could see her wince. “Mike, that guy’s dead.”

  “Yeah.” I’d killed before, especially during the war, and it was never a little thing for me. But I couldn’t think about it now. “I’ll worry about that later.”

  “Can you get us out of here?”

  “If you can point the way out, yeah. Get on my back.”

  This time the run was easier. When I hit trees, I didn’t bounce off. They slammed down out of my way.

  A few minutes later, we got to where raging inferno turned into trees igniting from sparks and embers, then to where trees were unburned. Hathor took off her helmet, stowing it in her pack, and unsealed her jumpsuit top to cool down.

  We walked in the direction she thought Conrad and the settlers had gone. When we could see it through the treetops, the late afternoon sky ahead was still hazy, but was the blue-green of Black Forest’s daytime, not the ash gray we’d grown used to in the last several hours.

  A question occurred to me. “You, uh, heard my meltdown, didn’t you? In your mind?”

  “Yeah. You were kind of broadcasting.”

  “Don’t tell anybody, all right?”

  She chuckled. “Why not? I think I like you better when you’re a hot mess.”

  Five

  It wasn’t long before we found the settlers’ trail. A group of one hundred and thirty eight humans, assorted pe
ts, and one dog-man leave a track even a clod like me or a city girl like Hathor could detect. A while after that, we caught up to them.

  It was a mob of grownups and children, dogs running loose or on leashes, other animals such as cats and birds in carriers. The people carried old-fashioned photo albums and heirloom family Bibles, packs full of diplomas and wedding certificates, love letters and refrigerator art, toys and yellowing hand-written recipes. People and their stuff. People and their memories.

  One of them was Dianita Sanchez, age four and a half. Hathor gravely returned Little Dee to her and asked, “Why did you drop her, honey?”

  Dita held the doll, hugging her, and answered. “I didn’t want her to get burned up. I knew you’d find her for me.”

  Dita was too young and too tired for much questioning, but Hathor told me later that she thought maybe Dita had a premonition of what Sethlans planned for the settlers. Maybe she did have a vision of Hathor returning Little Dee to her. We decided to check in with Dita from time to time. It might be that in fifteen years or so she’ll turn out to be Black Forest’s first native-born super.

  Just short of twilight, the news crew waiting at the fire break protecting the next town over, miles west of Dalton Valley, got good footage of all of us trooping, exhausted, out of the endangered area. We were one hundred and forty two newsworthy human and near-human survivors. I didn’t look all that good in the interviews that followed—I was a big mass of bruised meat with a bald head and a torn-up-to-hell heat suit—but I felt all right.

  So what changed after that?

  A Terran filmmaker visiting Firstfall turned out to have a script called Dalton Valley Tragedy which indicted Schwarz-Wiley for producing dangerous bioengineered products. The filmmaker got indicted instead. He rolled over on a vice president of operations for Gainer Genetics, who was indicted in turn on a large number of counts of conspiracy and attempted murder.

  The Black Forest government reseeded the burn zone with taptrees and grapethorns. The comparatively rapid process of turning the region into rich farmlands would go on.

  They found Sethlans’ personal vehicle, a twenty-year-old Vulcan-built saucer, armed among other things with an EMP projector; the saucer was stashed south of the start of the chain of fires. They also found Sethlans’ body, what was left of it—a few charred bits preserved within some charred power armor, not far from the Dalton River. The authorities didn’t press charges against me. They seldom do when it’s super against super and the bad guy loses.

  The residents of Dalton Valley rebuilt their town, aided by donations from Schwarz-Wiley. They named a street after each of us. Mine was named Calle Estrada. I thought that was a much better idea than naming a wine after me. No one wants to drink a wine called Anvil. “It sits heavy in the stomach and has a metallic aftertaste.”

  Not long after, another dozen families settled in Dalton Valley.

  Me, I finally bought some land, forty acres of rolling turf abutting Hathor’s little vineyards. I planted taptrees, the long-life variety, on my property. My income soared—since beating Sethlans, I’d been capable of pulling entire taptree root systems out of the ground with a single clean and jerk and of carrying multi-ton blocks of construction materials around. I got a new contract from t’Darthesin Robotics test-piloting the most dangerous sorts of experimental land vehicles.

  Conrad, Hathor, and I began getting together pretty regularly, assisting the territorial police as needed. We spent recreation time in a team clubhouse on my property, a repurposed survival shack tricked out with a pool table, home theater, hot tub, and weight room. We saved a village from mudslides not long after the fires, and then broke up a slaver ring preying on incoming colonists after that. But Conrad never would take a code-name, even though I suggested such gems as Dober Man, the Dalton Rover, Scratch ’n Sniff, and Rex Everything He Touches.

  So that was the legacy of Sethlans’ plan. For a guy who used to have crime-fighting luchadores coming to him for autographs, for a gal who had her first platinum record and her first presidential commendation when she was sixteen, for a guy who controlled the largest personal fortune on Black Forest, maybe ordering pizza more often than fighting crime wasn’t much to brag about.

  But it was a start.

  About the Author

  Novelist Aaron Allston is best known for his work in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. He has also written original science fiction, fantasy, and horror, novels in other licensed universes, and nonfiction (including Plotting: A Novelist’s Workout Guide for writers). He lives in Central Texas.

  Visit his personal web site at www.aaronallston.com and his e-book sales site at www.archerrat.com.

  About the Story

  A long-time role-playing gamer, Allston ran a superhero campaign, utilizing the Champions/Hero System game rules, for nearly twenty-five years. “Retreads” takes place in that setting. A full account of the genesis and writing of the story is available as “Retreads Author’s Notes” from www.archerrat.com.

  Stupendous Sparkle

  Janine K. Spendlove

  “And so, Miss Sparkle—”

  “It’s just Sparkle.” I curse myself once again for picking such a stupid sidekick name, but hey, when you’re a little girl Sparkle seems like the BEST. NAME. EVER. And not at all like a stripper name.

  I was seven years old and walking home from school the first time I was bullied in America.

  “Go back to Africa, Chei!” A square-faced, blond-haired girl named Megan barred my way. She tugged on my braids any chance she got during recess.

  “And what kind of name is Cheineze?” A curly-haired boy with a massive booger hanging on the edge of his left nostril pulled my backpack off and tossed it into the bike lane. “Shay-nee-zee sounds like a sneezey!” Mikey laughed at his own cleverness, while I tried not to cry.

  I didn’t want to hurt these kids, and more than that I’d only ever wanted to be friends with them. But fear can lead anyone to behave cruelly, and while I thought I’d managed to keep my secret hidden, clearly someone, probably Megan, had seen me freeze that butterfly in midair at recess so I could look at the pretty orange on its wings.

  That was what made me different – not the dusty dark color of my skin, not that I was from Mozambique and still trying to grasp English. No, it was that I could do something they couldn’t and it scared them.

  “Awww, is Shay-Shay gonna cray-cray like a widdle bay-bay?” That was Jet, dark haired and Chinese-American.

  “Stop it.”

  “You gonna make me Shay-Shay?” Jet gave me a rough shove and Megan shoved me back toward him. Jet moved out of the way and I fell to the concrete skinning my hands and knees.

  I bit back another cry. I’d learned not to cry before I learned how to talk. Crying just got you beaten by those bigger than you. And that’s why no matter how much these kids hurt me I wouldn’t fight back—I wouldn’t hurt others the way I’d been hurt. I wouldn’t continue the cycle of abuse. Of course my child-mind thought of it in much simpler terms than these, but that was essentially the gist.

  A foot kicked into my side, then another, and then another. I swallowed the pain and looked around for a policeman; my new parents said I should go to one of them if I ever got in trouble. They said that the police in this country could be trusted, and for that I was grateful.

  I was bracing myself to get up and run when suddenly the kicking stopped. Hearing grunts and cries of surprise I rolled onto my back with a wince and beheld an amazing sight.

  There was Bryan swinging my backpack into the gang of bullies.

  “Stay away from my sister!” Though older than me by one whole year, Bryan was small for his age. He didn’t let that stop him. Without any care for himself, he plunged into the fray, the red cape his mother, and, I supposed, now my mother, made for him hanging off his back.

  “She’s a freak!” Megan and Mikey each managed to grasp one of Bryan’s arms and hold him tight.

  “So’s your face!” Bryan kicked a
t them ineffectually while Jet stalked toward him, chubby hands balled into fists.

  “No! Stop! Please stop!” I watched as Jet stopped in front of Bryan, who was still valiantly struggling to break out of their hold.

  Mimicking me in a high-pitched voice, “Stop, please stop,” Jet punched one meaty fist into Bryan’s gut before tossing me a smile. “Make me, Shay-Shay.”

  Jet pulled back another arm, clearly about to punch again and I watched as Bryan, no, my brother stood there bravely ready to take a hit for me.

  Suddenly, as if he had the strength of a grown up, Bryan ripped his arms free and with a look of surprise, then glee, soared over Jet’s head before landing behind him. The bully’s punch flew wide, hitting Megan in the nose and Mikey in the ear. Bryan, recovering quickly from the shock of his sudden strength and giant leap, pushed Jet down onto his fellow bullies.

  Standing over the three of them as they cowered on the sidewalk, my brother placed his hands on his hips and struck a heroic pose. “You stay away from my sister, you hear?” Then wagging a finger at them he added, “and from all other kids too! No more teasing or being mean, okay?”

  Nodding their heads, they scrambled to their feet and made a hasty exit toward Union Station, but not before Megan shot a hate filled look in my direction and mouthed “Freak!”

  Bryan leaned over and reached out a hand. “You okay, sis?”

  I just stared at him, hesitating. “Why did you help me?” What was his ulterior motive? Experience had taught me no one helped you for free.

  He blinked, clearly confused. “Because you’re my sister. We’re family, and families help each other.”

  That was the moment my world changed, because I knew he meant it. I could feel it to my very core.