by David Reiss
Peregrine possessed the power to fly at ludicrous speeds and was damned near indestructible while doing so. The man was a living kinetic weapon, capable of piercing almost any defenses if he found a long-enough path in which to accelerate. Beazd had been strong and durable, but when an irresistible force met an only somewhat immovable object...the somewhat immovable object was sure to suffer.
If Beazd's death had occurred in the heat of battle, if lives were at stake and split-seconds mattered, then perhaps a jury could have been convinced that the hero made a rational choice given the available information. No such battle had taken place. Beazd had never been a threat to the general public and Kenta Takuma hadn’t so much as jaywalked since his from prison early for good behavior. Beazd’s only 'crime' had been keeping in touch with his childhood friends and thus knowing where to find still-active members of the FTW.
A violent interrogation of an unresisting subject. A horrific miscalculation. A crime.
I was surprised. I shouldn't have been! Fifteen years I’d spent fighting a bloody and violent crusade against heroes unworthy of the title, and yet this blatant act was still shocking to me. Not the death itself; I'd fought the man who'd killed Kenta, and I'd known that it was only a matter of time before his hands were stained as red as my own. He was too arrogant and too easily distracted to be trusted with his power.
It was the Sphinx's actions that took me aback; the leader of the New York Shield had known what the evidence would reveal and tried to bury it all. She’d exhibited a cold-hearted pragmatism that I hadn’t expected to see from her side of the spandex divide.
The Red Ghost often credited the Sphinx as one of his mentors and inspirations. Did he know, I wondered? When he’d been a member of the New York Shield, had the Red Ghost made ‘mistakes’ similar to Peregrine’s and asked his team leader to help conceal them? Had I placed a murderer’s action figure next to my brother’s crayon drawings?
Starnyx begged me to do nothing rash, to do no violence in his pacifistic comrade’s memory; I stayed with Eric for days and it had been extraordinarily gratifying how easily the unarmored Terry Markham had fallen into the role of friend. We drank too much, ate cheap takeout and talked late into the night. He had a clever and altogether peaceful plan to gain his revenge, and I pledged my support.
I respected his devotion. In the heat of the moment, meeting Eric’s fiercely determined expression with a supportive smile, I’d thought that I might be able to share it. Sadly, that flash of inspiration faded and was replaced by a much more familiar bitter fury.
I wanted to hit something. Fortunately…for a creature like Doctor Fid, opportunities for conflict were never far out of reach.
◊◊◊
Micro-drones fed telemetry, sonar and radar scans to my helmet, providing a real-time map of the darkened warehouse and all its inhabitants' locations to within a centimeter's accuracy. I knew the location of every shelter, every pillar and piece of debris. The display was useful as I triggered a 93% pulse of my powered-armor's thrusters that overtaxed my inertial dampeners and crushed the air from my lungs. I dove backwards like a shot, safe behind cover before the Shrike could ready a second attack.
The temporary inability to breathe was beneficial; the pause allowed for the successful muting of my helmet's microphone before the heroes could hear me scream.
Shrike (clad in a gray, black, and white bodysuit) was a relatively new hero who’d supposedly been granted power by an extra-dimensional entity; he could psychically create pale white-yellow glowing projections that would spear outwards from nearby surfaces. In the past, the Shrike had primarily spawned blunt bars of varying thickness. He'd even knocked out the notoriously hard-headed Minotaur by placing a pillar in front of the charging criminal. Less often, Shrike also used his power to create needle-sharp spikes, leaving the worst of his enemies impaled like the victims of his namesake bird. To the best of my knowledge, Shrike only used that ability on brutes with a known regenerative capability.
Facing the notorious villain Doctor Fid, and with two of his companions already knocked unconscious, the Shrike had revealed a new ability: creating a two-dimensional plane of force capable of cutting through matter like a monomolecular blade.
“Oh my god!” The hero's voice sounded ill. “Is that his arm?”
“I...” My voice echoed menacingly, reverberating throughout the abandoned warehouse, “...am going to want. That. Back.” Software scrubbed tension and pain from my voice, transmitted through my scattered drones' speakers simultaneously so as to hide my exact location. Meanwhile, my armor's built-in medical system poured painkillers into my body and the inner suit constricted above the point of amputation to limit further blood loss. Oddly, the tourniquet hurt worse than the wound itself.
My defensive systems were rebooting, the Mk 28 powered-armor was compromised but still functional, and my heavy-combat drones were only a few minutes away. This battle was not yet lost.
“He's lost a lot of blood,” Psion cautioned. One of only three heroes still standing, the short Korean woman's outfit was orange with dull yellow accents. “He can't have gotten far. We can catch him before he escapes!”
Escape wasn't my goal.
I fed the sound of heavy footsteps and scrabbling gravel through a drone in front of them and activated my anti-grav field. Floating silently, I circled through the shadows. Sensors monitored the heroes' heights and the direction that their heads were turned, allowing me to map a smooth course beyond their line of sight.
My scepter drifted to my remaining hand, and I gripped the shaft so tightly that my fingers ached. Physical strain seemed to help me concentrate.
“Stay close!” Psion urged, her fists beginning to flare as she readied an attack. “He's wounded, but he's still Doctor Fid.”
“I thought that he had a force-field?” Shrike whispered, his voice still shaky. Targeted audio analysis revealed that his heart rate was unusually fast and hi-res video showed the tremble in his hands. “I just wanted to trap him, the wall is stopped by—”
“I disabled it.” The third hero's name was Wildcard. From my research, he had access to a broad range of powers...but only three at a time, and it took several minutes to change whatever combination was presently active. One of his current powers, I now knew, was the disruption bolt that had struck me earlier, and—given that I'd seen him shrug off one of my heavy putty-shot stunning blasts—I felt comfortable presuming that his second power was some sort of super-human toughness. The nature of his third active power was still a mystery. “I should've said someth-”
“Quiet,” Psion interrupted. “The blood trail stops here.”
It was a dark night with only a sliver of moon, and the warehouse's remaining windows were clouded with long neglect. The trio huddled in the circle of purple illumination cast by Psion's powers; beyond that radius, the black was deep and sinister, and I was invisible within the gloom. The red glow and starfield motif normally displayed upon my powered-armor had been dimmed to an ink-dark finish.
Again, I used my microdrones' speakers to simulate the sound of movement through the shadows in front of them and added an ultra-low frequency hum throughout the building to create a general sense of unease. The three heroes looked at each other, visibly steeling themselves for combat and gathering confidence from each other's presence.
This fight should not have happened.
A shipping container had arrived via a New York port and been readied for delivery to a secret laboratory that I owned in Nashua, Vermont; unfortunately, the delivery was lost before it left the city. The Red Hook Spiders, a low-level street gang, hijacked the truck seeking the televisions that had appeared on the container's manifest. All they’d found was an assortment of raw materials and machined components.
Under normal circumstances I might have written the loss off. Nothing in the container was irreplaceable, nor did the street gang have the resources to connect the shipment to me. At that particular moment, however, Doctor Fid’
s illicit finances were still recovering from the strain caused by the Red Ghost’s investigation. Also, I happened to be in New York after visiting Starnyx and was thus in a mood well-suited for violence.
I waited for a few heavy-combat drones to fly their way from the Boston area (and for Eric to take a nap), then donned the recently repaired Mk 28 and tracked down the Spiders. Fair compensation was offered for their inconvenience (a reputation for being magnanimous could be valuable) and when they responded rudely, I set about correcting their manners (a reputation for being dangerous could be valuable as well). The resulting explosions attracted the interest of a local superhero group—the Brooklyn Knights.
Full credit should be given where credit is due: The Knights recognized my armor and immediately leapt to attack. I was a known powerhouse and they, a young and untested team. Their bravery, if not their common sense, was remarkable.
I could have simply escaped, could have launched into some menacing monologue and flown to safety. But doing so would have left the shipping container behind...valuable resources that might, by more competent investigators, be traced to my Nashua lab, or to the Port Authority employee that had ensured that the shipping manifest went unchallenged. Against unexpected foes upon whom I'd done very little research, the rational choice would have been to accept the losses and disappear. I should have left, but at that moment I was simply too irked to make the logical decision; I tasked my heavy-combat drones with airlifting the container to a safe location and faced the Knights with nothing but my own armor and scepter. And now, I was fighting through dizziness and multitasking furiously, attempting to solve four problems at once.
First, determining how long my medical nanites would keep my severed limb viable so that surgical robots could reattach it without complications. Second, developing an algorithm that would (in the future, at least) cause the nanites to destroy DNA and other identifying data from my blood if it were exposed to open air. Third, analyzing data logs to determine how Wildcard's attack disrupted my force-field so that I could hack together a quick defense.
And fourth, was, of course, planning a method to defeat my opponents with sufficient drama that they remembered my victory more vividly than they remembered the sight of my amputated arm.
The spilled blood would need to be eradicated manually once the heroes had been dealt with. Leaving any genetic evidence that could link the nefarious Doctor Fid to Terrance Markham would be catastrophic to my long-term plans; I'd always been careful to maintain separation between my two identities. The powered armor suits that made Doctor Fid so infamous did not utilize any technologies that could be traced to the moderately-famous founder of AH Biotech, and (although I’d produced patents and scholarly papers in many fields from my time in academia), Dr. Markham had been focusing on medical technologies in recent times. The supervillain known as Doctor Fid, however, was notable primarily for his work in robotics, software engineering and energy manipulation.
Injecting the nanites into my own body had been a calculated gamble. They were still in the research phase, years away from federal approval...but they were certainly AH Biotech's design and could theoretically be traced back to the company. Since Doctor Fid recently (very publicly) robbed the company's research facilities, however, it could be posited that I'd gotten access to the nanites during the assault. And the benefits more than outweighed the risks. Even at room-temperature and with the rigors of combat, I calculated that I had several hours before my detached arm would suffer sufficient degradation as to make reattachment impossible. As a secondary bonus: I was in no danger of bleeding to death.
Having successfully delivered the cargo container to safety, my heavy-combat drones were speeding back to this location. The twelve-foot-tall cylinders would look to be dark star-fields, holes in the sky opening into darkest space; with their weapons, manipulation arms and their spider-like walking legs stowed, no red glow would be discernible at the joints. A stern-faced general once referred to my drones as “the densest concentration of military might on the face of the planet” while addressing Congress and they'd been upgraded several times since.
Had I simply stayed quiet and concealed, it would’ve been less than a minute before I could have called down destruction upon the remaining heroes. And then (when they regained consciousness) the Brooklyn Knights would have reported that they were defeated by Doctor Fid's robots.
That thought left a sour taste in my mouth. Sudden vengeance pouring forth from the heavens might intimidate, but it would not overshadow the Knights' memory of my injury, nor the sight of me retreating into darkness. They needed to be brought low by Doctor Fid rather than Fid's toys.
Also, my arm was lying in the dirt and the most powerful painkillers modern science could fathom were unable to eliminate my discomfort. Instructing my drones to attack would lack the visceral punishment that I wanted to inflict.
My now-rebooted personal force-field was altered to function in alternating micro-pulses (thus forming a harmonic to resist Wildcard's disruption capabilities) and I re-enabled the Mk 28 powered-armor's characteristic starfield-and-red aspect; in the lightless night, it would have looked as though I simply faded into being. I stilled, silent as a statue, and waited for the heroes to notice.
While waiting, I programmed the combat drones to rescue me if I lost consciousness. As the old Latin proverb stated: 'fortune favors the bold...but a reserve force of almost indestructible battle automatons is good, too'.
“Ohholycrap!” Shrike yelped, twisting and waving an arm frantically in my direction; a glowing column of energy exploded into existence from the ground near my left foot, tilted to thrust towards my chest. I sidestepped smoothly. For a moment, they were too shocked to continue their attack.
I knew what they saw: Seven and a half feet tall, a sleek armored figure missing its right arm just below the shoulder with gore and bone clearly visible. The armor's black surface was somehow deeper than the shadows surrounding it, broken by the light of distant stars and a dull crimson glow that helped provide an outline for the humanoid shape. The apparition gripped a scepter in its left hand, held more like a club than like a walking stick; the ruby pommel burned like a dying sun, menacing and angry. And the specter's helmet: dark, featureless and smooth save for a trace of vermilion indicating the face-plate's seam. The infamous Doctor Fid, bloodied but unbowed. I laughed and my armor's vocoder automatically altered the tone until the sound was so menacing it surprised even me.
As one, the Knights rushed to offense: Wildcard darted forward, shielding his companions with his toughened body as he raised a glowing hand to launch a second disruption blast in my direction. Simultaneously, Shrike summoned another gleaming rod to shoot forward from the ground in front of Wildcard's feet, and Psion launched a powerful beam of purple energy. I shot ahead, again veering to evade Shrike's attack while blocking Psion's ray with the shaft of my scepter. Wildcard's burst struck my personal force-field and dissipated without effect. Hah.
My fighting style in armor is more a function of clever programming than of personal skill. I've trained in multiple martial arts but have successfully faced many whose skill and talent easily eclipsed my own. Algorithms collated data from dozens of sensors and could move more quickly and accurately than anything human. Years of training and experience made the transition smooth: Some moments I was the Mk 28's direct controller, and other moments I was merely its passenger. Complex predictive processes enabled me to dance effortlessly between attacks and close ground until I was within striking distance.
I shifted to my left to place Wildcard directly between myself and Psion; she had no easy shot, not without endangering her teammate. Another of Shrike's pillars rushed towards me, narrowly dodged as I swung my scepter to strike Wildcard across his right collar bone. The meaty thump was shockingly loud but did not appear to be debilitating; the hero merely grunted and reached up, unsuccessfully trying to grab my scepter's shaft before I could pull it away. I upgraded my mental estimate as to his
level of invulnerability; a similar blow would have driven a charging bull to ground.
Psion circled to her left and I attempted to mirror her, except that Shrike summoned a web of intersecting poles to obstruct my path; a purple energy blast slammed into my hip with the force of a speeding truck. I was knocked back and spun around, but anti-gravitics kicked in before I toppled.
Wildcard took the opportunity to land a painful haymaker (His third power identified: Super-human strength.) to the back of my head. The two successful attacks left me spinning, but I'd faced Whirlwind four times in the past. Reflexively, I used the momentum to twist into a powerful swing and launched my crackling scepter at the ground beneath Wildcard's feet.
The concrete detonated and the explosion threw the stunned hero twice his own height into the air. Shrike raised his arm to protect his eyes against shrapnel, and Psion flared so bright that her purple aura almost turned white. Wildcard landed with a graceless thud.
My lips were split open again; these Knights may have been a new group, but they certainly weren't lightweights! The two members that I'd rendered unconscious outside, Blizzard and White Tigress, had also shown surprising strengths. I wondered why these inexperienced champions chose to create their own team. With their skills, the individual Knights would have been welcomed into any of the more well-established organizations in this city. Certainly, the New York Shield would have fallen over themselves attempting to recruit these young heroes: they were reasonably well-trained, moderately powerful, and worked well as a team. I would definitely be performing more research on them in the future.
An analytic program had been monitoring Shrike during his attacks. The white-yellow constructions were extra-dimensional in nature and, as near as I could determine, physically unbreakable. The hero did, however, need to look directly at the surface he was summoning his projections from: If he wanted to summon a column from the floor at my feet, he had to glance down at the ground. Although one summoned pillar could likely stop a speeding freight train in its tracks, a sufficiently accurate predictive algorithm tied to sensors monitoring the direction of his gaze could anticipate his attacks.
