He didn’t wait for Dawn. The calculating part of his mind that was always on, even in times of passion or stress, figured that it would be best if they joined the action separately. They were fifty feet underground but luckily even this mostly mothballed hangar had fast-deployment hydraulic catapults. He stepped into a cylindrical chamber and was launched up like a cannonball. He emerged from the hangar already moving at a good fifty miles an hour.
When his feet hit the ground, he raised that speed tenfold in one second.
Swift’s power had two main components. First, he created a frictionless force field around him that made him nearly invulnerable in addition to reducing air drag. To achieve higher speeds, the force field changed and he became intangible, no longer subject to friction and able to move at five or six times the speed of sound without unleashing a devastating sonic boom in his wake. All those powers only worked when he ran or spun in place, for reasons nobody had been able to fathom. The mechanisms behind his abilities remained a mystery. A liberal arts major, Larry had never been much for the hard sciences, and he didn’t care much about how his powers worked.
All he cared about was his speed, and all the tricks he could play with it.
Inside the field, the world slowed to a crawl. A cruise missile floated lazily overhead. Larry altered his trajectory and he shot up into the air, intercepting the missile and becoming solid just as he met his target, obliterating it. As he emerged from the explosion, he turned insubstantial again and ran through the air until he caught another missile and destroyed it. Neither explosion made an impression on him; he was back on the ground a fraction of a second later. Unfortunately those had been the only missiles within his reach, and too many of them had already struck their targets.
Where the Freedom Building had once stood there was nothing but a billowing cloud of dust and smoke.
Olivia had been there. He had memorized her schedule, the better to plan his date with Dawn.
Larry screamed his wife’s name and charged into the burning ruin.
Christine Dark
New York City, New York, March 13, 2013
The TV report convinced Christine she wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
Father Aleksander had served her some truly excellent borsch. While she devoured it, he explained that she had been found unconscious in Central Park two nights ago and taken to New York-Presbyterian Hospital. There, he continued as she slurped on, some Mafia guys had abducted her. An associate of Father Aleksander had rescued her from her captors and brought her to the church, where a parishioner who happened to be a nurse had checked her out and dressed her in the funky pajamas. Father Alex called her rescuer the Faceless Vigilante, which sounded rather silly, but he had said the name very seriously.
The account matched her memories of the dream much too closely; that almost freaked her out all over again. Somehow she managed to keep her cool. Father Aleksander’s friendly demeanor helped calm her down, or maybe his borsch’s secret ingredient was a generous helping of Xanax. She was scared, but the fear wasn’t overwhelming her, and that was so unlike her it added an extra scary layer to the whole thing. It was so weird she had to set it aside for the moment. Christine concentrated on eating and listening and tried not to dwell on anything right away.
Things got even weirder when she asked to borrow a phone.
“You can use my wrist-comm,” Aleksander said. He unstrapped a weird cell phone from his wrist and handed it to her. Okay, so maybe that’s what they called them in the Ukraine or whatever.
The phone wasn’t like any mobile device Christine had seen, and she had changed plans on a nearly seasonal basis since age sixteen; between her and Sophie they had tried everything under the sun, including all the I-stuff Apple gleefully pushed out every year. The device she was holding was clearly meant to be worn strapped on your wrist, like an old-school wristwatch. It was bigger than your typical smart phone, and it had a flip cover over a screen that lit up, with the date and time on the top, a row of icons off to one side, and a colorful background picture of an ancient church. It had a keyboard and the screen was touch-sensitive; the whole thing was fairly user-friendly, although not quite like anything else she had ever used before.
Christine decided to try Sophie’s number first, to try and find out what the frak had happened the night of the party. It was also one of the only three numbers she had memorized, the other two being her own and her mother’s. She really didn’t want to call Mom, not until she figured out what was going on.
“I’m sorry,” the wrist-phone or comm or whatever said in a pleasant female voice. “Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please make sure to enumerate the area code and the eight digit number you are trying to reach.”
Eight digit number? Christine typed the number again – and got the same message. She tried to punch a 1 before the area code to make it to eleven digits, and she got a slightly different message that pretty much said the same thing. “I don’t think the phone is working,” she said.
“Are you sure? It seems to be in working order.”
“Phone numbers are seven digits long,” Christine said. “With the area code, that makes ten.”
Father Aleksander looked confused. “That’s quite wrong, I’m sorry to say. Phone numbers are eight digits long, eleven with the area code.”
Christine gently put the wrist-phone thingy down and had some more some soup while she tried to think things through.
Explanation Number One: The good Father was out of his freaking gourd, kind eyes or not, and he’d probably put that useless talking wrist thingy together with a pieces of discarded I-Phones and baling wire. She wasn’t in New York, she was probably in some abandoned church in Michigan, and any second now Aleksander and the Faceless Vigilante, who probably was a leather-clad gimp living in a steamer trunk in the next room, would grab her and do unspeakable things while they sang a jaunty song from Oklahoma.
Explanation Number Two: Christine’s brain had been scrambled by some roofie combo last night, and she’d apparently forgotten a few facts of life, such as phone numbers having one more digit than she remembered and that the latest mobile devices had wrist straps. The damage was probably permanent and she’d spend the rest of her life painting pleasant watercolors in some innocuously-named institution with beautiful lawns and tall walls where they played soothing Enya tunes in the background.
Explanation Number Three: This was all a dream, and she was in a hospital, or lying unconscious on the frat house lawn, dreaming of Ukrainian Orthodox priests and wrist-comms and cabbage and kings. She would either wake up eventually, or check Explanation Two, except add more Enya, eliminate watercolor painting or any activity and, for an added bonus, orderlies rolling over her comatose body checking for bedsores every other week. With her luck one of the orderlies would be called Buck and he’d be there to… you know.
There was an Explanation Number Four, but she didn’t want to go there. Might as well enjoy the borsch and watch the boob tube, which was playing Live! With Regis and Betsy, which was weird because Regis had retired a while back and weirder still because there was no sign of Kelly Ripa or even Kathy Lee anywhere and she had no clue who Betsy was. Whatever she did, she would not explore Explanation Number Four, because that way lay madness.
The arrival of the Faceless Vigilante had stopped her brain from shooting up into the stratosphere for a whole three seconds or so. One look at him and she’d known several facts with total conviction: she could trust him with her life, he wasn’t nearly as old as he looked, and she was going to hug him like his name was Teddy and it was stuffed bear season. Which led to discovering his real face was impossibly featureless. Which should have freaked the frak out of her, but somehow didn’t. The crazy is strong with this one, this one being me. Either she had quietly flipped out or her weirdness threshold had been exceeded to the point that her her freak-out engine was out of gas. Explanation One was discarded, which left Explanations Two or Three, but Four was beginning to poke it
s crazy little head from the corner of her mind she had consigned it to. People like Face-Off didn’t exist in her world. Which meant…
The news report came in, and that did the trick. Especially when they switched to a live report from the observation deck of the World Trade Center. The fact that the live report also showed several people in colorful costumes flying through the air in the best comic book tradition was only icing on the crazy cake.
Explanation Four: She was in a different world, where superheroes were real and Keanu Reeves wasn’t, where John Travolta was named Joseph, and people wore their cell phones on their wrists like people used to do with watches. Where Faceless Vigilantes could be literally faceless. Among God only knew how many other different things.
Face-Off and Father Aleksander watched the news intently until they went to a commercial break. For Pan Am Airlines. Which Christine only recognized from a short-lived TV show about an airline that no longer existed. In her world. No longer existed in her world. She had the sickening realization she was going to be using those words a lot. Her world. She wasn’t in her world anymore.
“Guys?” They turned to her. “My brain is about to explode. I don’t normally do this before noon. Or at all. But could I have something alcoholic in a glass? Or an IV bag, I’m not picky. Pretty please?”
Chapter Five
The Freedom Legion
Atlantic Headquarters, March 13, 2013
Kenneth Slaughter rushed towards the sound of the guns.
Off to his left, both the Freedom Tower and the Freedom Building were collapsing under multiple missile impacts. Up ahead, dozens of aerial platforms moved in a precise death dance, firing missiles from external launchers and maneuvering off to let following waves move into position for their own strikes. The swarm of projectiles reached out towards the still-standing buildings or targeted some of the running or flying individuals trying to defend the island. The attack was all beautifully coordinated, human ingenuity used for efficient death dealing.
The paradox had never been lost on Kenneth. He had become intimately aware of it in 1917, when he had been a terrified young man forcing himself to climb up a trench wall and charge towards massed machine guns and artillery, exquisitely crafted tools designed for the single purpose of ending life.
Even worse, he had learned he himself was quite capable of murder.
One night Kenneth had been in a trench raid that ended disastrously, flares dispelling the darkness, machine guns mowing down the rest of his squad. He had found himself alone and surrounded by enemies. He tried to surrender but an angry and terrified soldier, no older than he was, had stabbed him with a bayonet. The sudden agony and the outraged sense of betrayal had overwhelmed Kenneth. The world had dissolved into a red haze. When he regained his senses, he was the only living thing in the trench, surrounded by the bloody remains of twenty-three men he had slaughtered in his frenzied state. The incident had terrified him. He had resolved to forever bury his inner beast under a rational, emotionless façade. More importantly, he had devoted his life to seeking some form of redemption.
Over the ensuing decades, Kenneth had applied his superhuman talents toward finding a way to bring true peace to humanity. He had finally accepted that killing was an inherent part of the human condition, impossible to remove without destroying humanity itself. Since then, he had done his best to minimize the evil that men would invariably do.
The attack had found him in his underground lab, where he had been performing a routine review of the sixteen projects he was currently overseeing. Like all Genius-Type Neolympians, Kenneth was given to flashes of intuition that allowed him to envision amazing breakthroughs in a variety of scientific fields. His projects ran the gamut from high-energy physics to biotechnology. The development process was the main obstacle for Neolympians, who all tended to suffer from the scientific equivalent of short attention spans. Kenneth had long learned to pass on his ideas to teams of normal but patient scientists and engineers who would proceed to bring his visions to fruition. He still needed to periodically revisit the ongoing projects to make sure his subalterns didn’t miss some important detail that could derail a project.
The reason Genius-Types could produce so many breakthroughs in different fields was not a product of intelligence or education, Kenneth had concluded after years of observing his own talents. It was a psychic ability to identify the right answer without having to resort to the game of trial and error that normal scientists had to play. Furthermore, many Neolympian inventions were really not actual technological developments but artifacts created by the same mysterious force that gave parahumans their powers. Those creations could not be duplicated or mass-produced, and telling the two kinds of inventions apart often took a great deal of work.
To Kenneth’s eternal regret, all the technological wonders and miraculous creations of the Neolympian era had not stopped murder. If anything, they had made killing easier than ever before.
The evidence was literally exploding all around him.
As he emerged from the underground laboratory, Kenneth activated his own signature artifact, the Brass Man suit that had earned him his second code name. In the Thirties, he had been Doc Slaughter, one of the mystery men who battled evil during the chaotic years of the Great Depression. Under that name he had helped found the Freedom Legion during World War Two. A generation later, he developed his suit of powered armor, and the press dubbed him Brass Man and treated him almost as a completely separate persona. In some ways, the distinction was correct. His personality underwent some changes when he was behind the armor suit, becoming even more dispassionate and machine-like. It probably was a coping mechanism, necessary when he found himself wielding even more power than normal.
From hidden compartments in his belt, shoulders and boots, metal bands emerged and wrapped themselves around his limbs, head and torso, the flexible organic metal hardening into unyielding armor strips once all its pieces were in place. Doc Slaughter became a living bronze figure, a thing of overlapping plates and decorative rivets gleaming in the reflected sunlight and explosive flashes around him. Brass Man leaped and took flight, the propulsion jets built into several points of the armor suit giving him better acceleration and maneuverability than the most advanced fighter aircraft.
Becoming Brass Man was a heady experience. The sensor suite built into the armor flooded him with information only a mind as adept at his could assimilate. While in his armor his strength and durability were the equal or superior of most Type Two parahumans. He would need all the power at his disposal to help deal with the current situation.
The attackers were using waves of unmanned drones. A quick sensor sweep revealed their capabilities: they were low speed but high stealth weapon platforms, each armed with half a dozen cruise missiles. His sensors also detected the source of the attack, a flying vessel the size of a pocket battleship; that vessel had launched the drones. Freedom Island was guarded by one of the most sophisticated air defense systems in the world, but somehow the flying carrier ship had managed to get close enough to attack while remaining undetected. The first strike had destroyed or disabled most defense systems; the second one had struck buildings full of innocent civilians.
First things first. Twin balls of plasma shot out of his gauntlets, hitting a pair of drones dead center and vaporizing them. The plasma explosion also generated a large electro-magnetic pulse that fried the electronic systems of another half-dozen pods around the initial targets. Three more shots took care of seventeen drones. A part of him felt a rush of savage elation and wished the drones had been piloted by the murderers who had seen fit to attack innocent civilians. He pushed the dark emotions deeper down, where they could not bother him.
Other Legion members were on the offensive as well. Daedalus Smith flashed past Kenneth in his Myrmidon battle armor. Kenneth suppressed a surge of irritation at the sight. Daedalus had built his own armor suit not too long after Kenneth had become Brass Man. Kenneth could not deny the Myrmidon arm
or was highly effective and more powerful than his own, but the constant games of one-upmanship Daedalus insisted on playing got on Kenneth’s nerves, not that he ever let his feelings show. The Myrmidon soared through the drones and blew up several of them with a barrage of charged particle beams.
Behind the two armored warriors, other Legionnaires were dealing with the remaining cruise missiles. Dawn Windstorm surrounded herself with a tornado that intercepted several rockets and sent them spinning down into the sea. Hyperia the Invincible Woman chased down another missile and detonated it before it reached its target; she emerged from the fiery explosion unscathed and looking for more targets. From the ground, a couple dozen other Legion members and advanced Freedom Institute students were engaging the last remaining targets with a myriad powers ranging from telekinesis to laser beams.
The battle was not entirely one-sided, however. Some of the missiles were targeting Legion members. Kenneth’s sensors coolly listed a growing casualty list, Legionnaires killed or injured by direct hits or buried under collapsing buildings. The injured would most likely survive; Neolympians could recover from almost anything that did not kill them instantly. There dead could not be brought back, however.
All of the missiles and most of the drones were destroyed after a brief but brutal battle. The few survivors headed back to the carrier vessel, presumably to rearm. The carrier was moving as well, continuing on a direct heading toward Freedom Island. Kenneth flew towards the ship.
He was not alone. Telekinetic adept Mind Hawk had picked up four other Legionnaires – Gun Bunny, Shocking Susan, the Illusionist and Hercules Seven – and headed directly towards the flying carrier. The assault team had pulled ahead while Kenneth dealt with the drones. Kenneth followed them even as his sensors picked up Ultimate flying behind and rapidly overtaking him. Kenneth felt a familiar pang of envy. It shamed him to admit it, but a part of him was jealous of the Invincible Man. Even in his battle suit, Kenneth would never wield the sheer power that the likes of Ultimate and Janus had been blessed with. Perhaps it was better that way. The temptation to use such power for the betterment of mankind, whether or not mankind agreed, might have been too much for him to resist.
New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl Page 8
