Ultimate Warriors
Page 13
She laughed. "Your old buddy Jason," she teased.
"Firebrand? I knew he was going to get himself in trouble." Julien grinned. "For once, I’m glad I was right about him. When are we getting him out?"
"Anthony and I are getting him out in a few months," she assured him.
"Months?"
"He wants to be sure no one suspects him before he runs."
Julien sighed. "I want to go back."
"What?" She paled.
"Not permanently," he soothed her. "There’s someone— I trust Jennifer. She trusts me, and I can get her out, if we do it now."
"Soon. Give us time. For now, we have decisions to make."
Julien nodded sadly. He would get Jennifer out as soon as he could arrange it.
Tyler motioned for Julien’s attention. He handed over an identi-card. "This is yours. You may travel where you wish with it."
"Any city?" he asked, stunned that no one was listing his allowed zone.
"Any city."
Julien searched the card.
As if he understood Julien’s concern from years of dealing with new Suraden-born powers, Tyler removed his own card and passed it across the table. "They are the same. It doesn’t mark you as a power in any way. You have to choose many things — and learn a few things."
Tyler motioned the people with him in turn. "Mary will tutor you in history, customs and laws. Neil will help you choose where you will live."
Julien looked to Angel. "Where do you live?" he asked solemnly.
She laughed heartily. "The Greek isles, but I’ve considered relocating to Eire."
He waited patiently for her answer.
"Eire," she decided.
Julien nodded and looked to Neil. "Eire — if you please."
Tyler looked from Julien to Angel in confusion. "If you’d like Neil to show you the choices you have," he began.
Julien nodded. "For travel," he assured them. "I would like to know this world."
Tyler shrugged and moved on. "Sarah will help you choose clothing and belongings with your initial stipend. Since you are uncomfortable with your situation, we will do as much as we can via electronic purchases. Last but not least, Evelyn will arrange for your job certifications, education, and other paperwork."
Julien darkened. "What paperwork does one need to marry on this world?" he asked.
Angel choked. "I haven’t said yes," she managed in a harsh whisper.
Tyler stifled a laugh and hid a smile behind his hand.
Julien smiled and stroked her cheek. "Aloud? No. You haven’t — yet."
She blushed and shot a sheepish look at the end of the table. "Evelyn, if you don’t mind," she hinted.
Julien drew her face back to his. "Tell me."
Angel smiled. "Yes. I will marry you."
The End
HEROES INCORPORATED
By
Joy Nash
© copyright August 2004, Joy Nash
Chapter One
Wednesday, 10:47 p.m.
Three days, one hour, thirteen minutes, and counting…
Oh, man. It was his lucky day. An original 1951 Action Comics #158, The Kid from Krypton, shimmered before his eyes, thirteen minutes from closing on eBay.
Yes! Clark Kendall raised both arms in a two-fisted salute to the superhero gods. He’d lusted after this particular Superman comic book for ages. Now it was as good as his.
He typed in his bid the old-fashioned way. On his laptop keyboard. It launched into cyberspace just as the telephone shrilled.
He snagged the receiver. "Heroes Incorporated. Yeah, we deliver. Go ahead."
He shifted the phone to one shoulder as he watched the eBay screen refresh. "One roast beef hero sandwich, no onions. One Italian hero, hold the mayo. Drinks with that? Two Cokes. Your address? Right. Got it. Twenty minutes."
He cut the connection, wondering how long it would be before the hungry customers figured out their dinner wasn’t coming. Amazing. Even with absolutely no advertising, the fake New York-style sub shop four levels above his head still managed to attract business. Almost made him want to open a strip mall take-out restaurant in Newark, New Jersey for real.
Almost, but not quite.
He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and squinted at the laptop screen. Damn. Someone had topped his bid. He typed in a counteroffer and sent it scurrying across the broadband connection.
"Hey, Clark."
He swiveled his desk chair toward the door, swallowing hard. Diana Price had come looking for him? More luck. That only happened in his dreams.
He watched as the shapely Amazonian princess sashayed into the Heroes Incorporated control room, forty-four-and-a-half double D’s all but exploding out of her skimpy costume. When she leaned over the back of his chair and brushed her chest against his shoulders, he nearly passed out.
"What are you doing?" she asked, peering at the computer screen.
Trying desperately to breathe, Clark thought, but masculine pride prevented him from cluing Diana in on that little bit of information.
"I’m on eBay," he told her. "I put in a bid on a Superman comic book."
"Think you’ll get it?"
He craned his neck to get a better look at her boobs without being too obvious. Did he think he’d get it? God, he hoped so.
"Clark? You okay?"
He gave himself a mental shake. "Yeah, fine. Listen," he said, forcing a casual tone. "My shift’s almost done. You want to go out for a drink afterward?"
Diana’s red lips quirked knowingly at him. Too knowingly. He knew he was toast even before she started laughing.
"I can’t." She presented him a smile reserved for children, puppies, and guys who were about to get the shaft. "I’ve got a date with Bruce."
Clark’s fist closed on his mouse so tightly it was a wonder the thing didn’t let out a squeal. Bruce Wynn, superhero. Scratch that. Superjerk.
"He’s just using you for the sex, you know."
Diana only laughed. "That’s what makes it fun." She gave him a little hug. "Aw, Clark, are you jealous? That’s so sweet."
He felt his cheeks heat. Sweet. Yeah, that’s what every superhero aspired to be.
As if on cue, Bruce appeared at the door, arms crossed over his steroid-enhanced chest. Muscles bulged under his gray spandex shirt and black tights. He wasn’t wearing his cape, but Clark could almost see the shiny black fabric flapping in an imaginary breeze.
Bruce nodded toward Diana. "Babe." His moody gaze shifted the tiniest bit to the right. "Clark."
Diana gushed a reply, making Clark slightly nauseous. Sure, Bruce was something to look at--and if you believed half the rumors, a veritable god in bed--but was that all a woman wanted in a guy? You’d think the ripped physique, perfect profile, and gloomy angst would get old after a while.
Bruce and Diana melded into a liplock. Clark pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and turned back to eBay. Only two minutes left, and he’d been knocked off the top again. Hell. He upped his bid into four figures and sent it flying. No way was he going to let this one go.
The phone rang again.
"Heroes Incorporated," Clark droned, then snapped to attention when Captain Marvelous’ radio-announcer voice crackled across the line.
"Clark, round up the troops. We’ve got a situation."
"A situation, Captain?"
From the corner of his eye, he saw Bruce and Diana disengage.
"Can’t say any more on an unsecured line, son, but I can tell you it’s not good. Tell every hero we’ve got on the books to report to my ready room in one hour."
Damn. Clark couldn’t remember the last time the Captain had ordered a full HI assembly. This was major. Another threat to life as they all knew it, most likely.
His gaze drifted back to eBay. His mysterious opponent had posted a winning bid two seconds before the countdown expired.
It looked like Clark’s luck had run out.
* * * *
Wedne
sday, 11:00 p.m.
Three days, one hour, and counting...
Yes!
Blossom Breeze sprang to her feet and did a little victory dance around her chair. That last minute bidder had come out of nowhere. She’d practically broken out in a cold sweat, but somehow she managed to squeak in under the wire to win the eBay bid for Action Comics #158, The Kid from Krypton. She’d only been looking for that particular issue forever. After it was framed, she’d hang it on her wall right between her signed portraits of Christopher Reeve and Dean Cain.
She collapsed in her chair and beamed at the screen. Life was perfect.
A nanosecond later, an Instant Message from Bernie popped up on her screen.
Okay, well maybe not so perfect.
Another geek occupied the cubicle to her right. Oh, sure, she could put a positive spin on things and say she spent every night surrounded by single men under thirty, but where would that get her? She’d still be right here in the computer lab at Megalopolis Polytechnic Institute.
She sighed as a series of numbers materialized in her IM window. Another one of Bernie’s freaking mathematical cryptograms. A second later, his head popped up over the partition, all bright eyes and big ears.
"Well, what do you say?"
Blossom squinted at Bernie’s coded message, but late as it was, the numbers could have spelled out "Do you want to get naked?" and she wouldn’t have even known it.
She blinked at the screen.
Hey. Wait a minute.
Do you want to... A sudden vision of a naked Bernie appeared in her brain, nearly shorting out the major synapses. Oh, please. No. Anything but that. Bernie weighed all of one hundred and thirty pounds, soaking wet. Naked or clothed, he wasn’t a feast for the eyes.
She steeled herself to decipher the rest of the coded sentence. ...go to the Star Trek convention tomorrow?
Her breath left in a rush. Thank you, God.
"So? Do you?" Bernie’s goofy grin stretched from ear to ear, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, puppy-dog style. No doubt he thought encrypted IM propositioning a very clever way to procure female companionship.
"James Doohan’s going to be there," he said in a wheedling tone.
Blossom gave him a thin smile. "I’d love to, Bernie. I really would. But tomorrow’s not good for me." I have to feed my goldfish. And wash my hair. And visit my gynecologist. "Maybe some other time."
"Geez, that’s too bad. A bunch of us are going to my place afterwards for a TOS marathon." TOS, Blossom knew only too well, was Geekspeak for Star Trek, The Original Series. As in Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.
"Sorry. I’ll have to pass."
"Your loss," Bernie said, and ducked back into his cell.
Sighing, Blossom logged off and shut down. Bernie wasn’t a bad guy, really. You could even make the case that his brain made up for what he lacked in physique. Of course, that was pretty much true of all the guys lurking in the bowels of the MPI computer department.
Call her shallow, but Blossom just couldn’t seem to get past appearances when it came to men. She liked them with muscles. Lots of muscles, bulging out all over. She drooled over sculpted pecs and corded biceps. She spun elaborate fantasies starring men who looked like the superheroes on her apartment walls.
Which could only be termed an ironic twist of fate, since Blossom’s off-the-charts IQ had dumped her squarely into geekdom. In her world, men who fit the superhero mold were very few and far between.
Life was a bitch sometimes.
Chapter Two
Thursday, 12:13 a.m.
Two days, twenty-three hours, forty-seven minutes, and counting...
Clark couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Captain Marvelous looking so grim.
In his long and illustrious career as CEO of Heroes Incorporated, the Captain had faced down more no-win situations than a marriage counselor. He excelled at snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. His keen mind and unerring instinct invariably chose just the right superhero to neutralize each dire threat that came across the hotline.
Clark shifted in his seat, trying to catch the faint breeze wafting from the overhead vent. When you crammed twenty-seven muscle-bound superheroes--and a few superheroines--into a small conference room, you tended to overload the air conditioning system. Too bad the ready room was three levels underground. Clark would have emptied his bank account for an open window. A little air freshener wouldn’t come amiss, either.
Bruce Wynn sat right up front, of course, shooting the room’s testosterone level right off the scale. As far as Clark was concerned, the guy didn’t even belong in HI. Bruce didn’t have any real superpowers. He was all cash, flash, and gadgets. Without his fortune and his technology, he’d be just another pretty face in the unemployment line.
Clark unzipped his laptop case and eased open his computer. He was HI’s official secretary, partly because he was the only superhero in the organization capable of stringing words into coherent sentences, and partly because his specialized psychic superpowers made it easy for him to take notes. He sent a burst of mental energy into the computer, causing the hard disk to whir in response. Bruce looked over, as if the sound irritated him.
Captain Marvelous took his position at the podium. Clark sat up straighter in his seat and gave HI’s fearless leader his full attention.
"Thank you all for arriving at such short notice," the Captain said. "I won’t beat around the bush, because frankly, we haven’t much time. Our operatives in the field have just uncovered a DP of massive proportions."
Clark and the entire assembly of superheroes gave a collective gasp. DP was superhero slang for "Diabolical Plot." DP’s were perpetrated by EMG’s, or "Evil Maniacal Geniuses." Clark shook his head. You just never knew when an EMG would snap. When one did, it wasn’t pretty.
Captain Marvelous cleared his throat. "According to my sources, Lex Loser’s tenuous hold on sanity has finally crumbled. He’s retreated to a secret underground lair to detonate a computerized neutron bomb. He intends to kill the entire population of Earth--without damaging its resources. After the explosion, he’ll live in luxury, attended by an army of robotic servants." The Captain exhaled heavily. "The bomb is set to go off Saturday at midnight."
A buzz of horror zapped back and forth across the room. Lex Loser was an EMG capable of perpetrating the worst atrocities, but this DP far surpassed any evil he’d previously conceived. Clark concentrated on thought-streaming his notes onto the computer even as his blood turned to ice in his veins.
Back in the last row, young Peter Parkington jumped up so quickly he almost dropped his camera. "I volunteer to take Lex down, Captain!"
Captain Marvelous shook his head at the kid. "I’m sorry, Peter. Superhuman speed and arachnid reflexes are not going to help with this one."
Dr. Banning stood up next, already looking a little green around the edges. "I’ll rip him limb from limb," he growled. His chest expanded, snapping the buttons off his shirt.
"Uh, I surely do appreciate the offer, Doctor," the Captain said. "But I’m afraid superhuman anger’s not the answer, either." He held up one hand to stop the verbal onslaught coming at him from every corner of the room. "In fact, no physical superpower will solve this dilemma. According to our latest intelligence, the computerized detonation device is so sensitive the slightest touch will set it off. We need someone with psychic skills to defuse it."
Clark looked up from his laptop to find every eye in the room on him. Psychic skills? Hot damn! That was his department. Finally, he’d get a chance to prove brains beat brawn any day of the week.
He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "I’ll be happy to take on the assignment, Captain."
"That’s good of you, Clark, but not quite good enough, I’m
afraid."
"But sir-- I can psychically defuse any computerized bomb. All I have to do is get within ten feet of it."
"Yes, well, that’s just our problem. Lex Loser’s lair is three hundred feet underground, and it’s impenetrable."
Bruce Wynn stood. "Nothing’s impenetrable. I’ll blast my way in."
"Oh right," Clark said, not even trying to hide his sarcasm. "Blow up the bomb. That’ll work."
A collective twitter swept through the room. Bruce’s face turned scarlet. Luckily, looks couldn’t kill, or Clark would be writhing on the floor, gasping for air.
The rich playboy turned on him. "What do you suggest, Geek Man? That we just beam over? Like on Star Trek?"
Captain Marvelous cleared his throat. "Now, now, boys. Petty rivalry won’t save the day. I’m not exaggerating when I say the situation is bleak and getting worse by the second. The bomb is set to detonate in two days, twenty-three hours..." He checked his watch. "...and sixteen minutes."
That quieted everyone down in a hurry.
"Unless we can come up with a plan of action," the Captain said, "life as we know it..."
will ... cease ... to ... exist, Clark mentally typed into the meeting minutes. Bingo. The superhero buzz phrase set off a renewed wave of furious whispers.
Clark frowned as he considered the various superpowers currently claimed by HI personnel. There were the mundane powers of strength, speed, and flight, and the rarer ones of x-ray vision, magnetic levitation, and setting oneself on fire with no untoward consequences.
And then there was teleportation...
Clark blinked. That’s it. If he could beam into Lex Loser’s hideout, he could defuse the bomb. Well, what do you know? For once in his life, Bruce the feeble-brained superjerk had said something intelligent.
Teleportation wasn’t a common superhero skill. In fact, it was the rarest. Currently, no one in HI claimed it. The last teleporting superhero, The Disappearing Man, had died twenty-four years ago while trying to teleport onto a stolen nuclear submarine. He’d accidentally materialized underwater and drowned.