Fid's Crusade

by David Reiss

  The predictive algorithms programmed within the Mk 28 powered armor were sufficiently accurate. I rocketed towards Psion, drifting around Shrike’s columns and spikes as he tried to protect his teammate. Psion’s eyes widened but she didn’t hesitate: She leaned forward, planting her feet firmly and extending both arms with her palms facing towards me. A tsunami of iridescent purple poured forth, a fiery blast that could have pierced a battleship’s armor. I diverted all power to forward shields and pressed forward through the brutal stream.

  According to my readings, the energy was astrophysical plasma; she wasn't generating the heavily ionized gasses so much as funneling them through a pinhole portal to the surface of some distant star. The purple color, however, was wrong for the heat and chemical composition. Some kind of localized alteration of physical laws—another extra dimensional effect, perhaps? Given some of the readings that I'd taken from Wildcard's blast, I could confirm that at least three of the Knights had powers that originated from outside this reality.

  The sources of superhuman powers were myriad; strange abilities of extra dimensional origin were not terribly uncommon. The coincidence was, however, worthy of note.

  Psion was almost within my grasp when a micro-drone notified me that Wildcard was back on his feet. He’d circled around and appeared to be preparing to shoot me in the back with his disruption attack. With my force-fields straining at maximum capacity, I wasn’t sure that the micro-pulse harmonic would be a successful defense; I triggered my thrusters and broke to my right. Wildcard’s blast narrowly missed, but Psion was able to maintain her aim: The flood of purple energy propelled me rearwards like a bullet.

  Again, I used the inertia to my advantage; I summoned my scepter to my hand and triggered minor course-corrections my trajectory. The purple torrent threw me towards Wildcard too quickly for him to react, and the pommel of my scepter landed a thunderous blow to his solar plexus. Wildcard went down and Psion broke off her attack.

  She looked…wasted: shaking, sweating, barely able to stand. Tears streamed down her mask, and a media replay indicated that she’d been screaming for the last few seconds of her attack. Her arms fell limp, trembling as she failed to raise them towards me. I tasked a micro-drone’s sensor array to begin a medical analysis and turned my back to her. With a sob, she collapsed to her hands and knees.

  While I strode towards the remaining combatants, I reviewed sensor data from the battle when it’d begun outside of the warehouse. Blizzard's powers, too, had some hallmarks of an extra-dimensional origin. Temperature variations that were not in keeping with air movements, atmospheric chemical composition that didn't match local levels of contaminants. He wasn't creating snow and ice locally...he was redirecting horrific ice-storms from somewhere else. That made at least four (if not all five) members of the Knights. I hadn't seen enough of White Tigress' abilities to offer any judgment.

  I clubbed the wheezing Wildcard again, knocking him unconscious with a sharp strike to the skull. According to an interview that he'd posted online three months ago, he could exchange out his powers for healing and regenerative abilities; when he became lucid, I was sure, he'd be able to cure any effects from concussion.

  Shrike was the last Knight standing.

  “You took my arm,” I growled, casually sidestepping another white-yellow spike that he'd aimed towards my chest. “If you surrender quietly, I might break only one of yours in retaliation.”

  “I've read about you. Valiant said that you don't break your word.” The hero’s voice shook and his shoulders hunched, but he looked ready to fight to the end if it became necessary. “You promise not to hurt them any more?”

  “I do.” I triggered my armor's anti-gravitics and floated towards him, using the extra height to loom. Speakers throughout the warehouse emitted a barely audible, foreboding hum.

  “Then I surrender.” He looked up at me briefly then wilted.

  “You're loyal,” I commented simply, setting down within striking distance of the hero.

  “They're my friends.” He lifted his chin, determined, and forced an unsteady smile. “My arm for their safety.”

  It was one thing to risk life and limb in the heat of battle, but it took a special kind of bravery to offer oneself as a willing sacrifice after the adrenaline has begun to fade. He looked young (mid-twenties, ethnicity uncertain due to his mask but visible skeletal structure and skin tone indicated possible latino and oriental mixed heritage) but was likely no stranger to pain; he and his friends were too well trained to be unfamiliar with discomfort. Shrike knew what he was offering and made the offer without flinching. I was impressed enough to consider letting him go unharmed.

  It would set a poor precedent; other heroes might think to surrender without a fight, and sometimes a fight was the purpose of the exercise. I could afford to be seen as occasionally magnanimous, but never as being soft. Still, it felt...strangely awkward, rewarding such courage with pain delivered in cold blood.

  My choice was taken from me when an alarm triggered on my heads-up display.

  “You're Psion's friend...you know her medical history?” I dismissed my scepter to its subspace storage and hooked Shrike by one arm, turning him towards his fallen teammates and dragging him along. He looked surprised at the contact, but (having already surrendered) didn't object. Sub-vocally, I transmitted a few other commands; my heavy-combat drones slammed to the ground outside the warehouse and deployed their walking legs. In combat, they would simply descend directly through the ceiling, but when a medical alert was declared they would avoid unnecessary flying debris. “Is she taking nitroglycerin tablets for her heart?”

  “What?” Shrike looked confused for a moment, then his eyes widened. “What's happening?”

  “Psion just passed out and her heartbeat is irregular.” He moved to take her hand while I performed a more detailed scan. “Blood pressure low, calcium and potassium imbalanced, vasoconstriction at the extremities, significant lactic acid buildup, tachycardia; likely physical strain due to power overuse. Do you know CPR?”

  “No.” He shrugged helplessly, hands clenching into nervous fists. “I'm supposed to get training next month.”

  All five of the Knights debuted seven months ago. Their American-English communication skills were decent, and they had similar East-Coast-collegiate accents despite significant dissimilarities in ethnicity. They fought together too well for only seven months of training, and there was no evidence of their powers at work prior to their first public appearance. Despite their skill, they lacked certain preparations that’d become quite common in local teams. No flashlights, no radios...Whoever trained the Knights, it certainly wasn’t any of the local hero establishments. Hadn't a villain named Skullface caused some sort of inter-dimensional breach in Central Park, eight months past?

  “I have one arm and I'm wearing powered-armor. I'll talk you through it while I get an automated external defibrillator ready.” Several of my drones contained basic first aid equipment, but only two of the combat drones had an AED installed; one of them skittered to me in response to a silent command. “The ground looks clear right there, no debris...roll her onto her back.”

  “OK.” He rolled her over carefully, his body language showing both nervousness and determination. It was odd that he trusted me so suddenly. Gratifying, but odd.

  “All right. Kneel next to her; place one palm slightly above her sternum.” I kept one eye on him as I struggled with opening the drone's storage compartment. “Good. Second hand on top of the first, lock your elbows and lean forward so that your shoulders are squared directly over your hands.”

  He nodded and complied. I performed some more surreptitious sensor analysis; whether my suspicions were correct or not, the Knights registered as close-enough-to-local-human that our medical techniques would not be harmful.

  “Good. She's breathing, so we're only going to perform chest compressions. Push down one-and-a-half to two inches. Use your weight, move quickly.” I started a metronome
program, indicating one hundred beats per minute. “She's small, but don't be too gentle. It's better to break a rib or two than to let her heart stop.”

  Shrike winced but nodded and began the procedure. I continued fighting with the drone's storage compartment. All items were stored securely in order to avoid rattling to pieces during battles, but the couplings had been designed under the assumption that I’d have two hands available. These items should have been fast-deploying, easy to access in the field! I hadn't considered that I might be required to perform medical treatment in the field while also being physically impaired. Careless. Thoughtless! I made a note to add quick-release bolts and simpler fastenings for future models.

  The other combat drones gathered the unconscious Knights on my orders; with a combination of tractor-beam technologies and shaped force-fields, the automatons created invisible stretchers to lift and transport the heroes safely.

  (My last combat drone was ordered to burn all evidence of my blood from the ground, to take possession of my severed arm, and then fly back to base. The swarm of micro-drones would hitch a ride.)

  I finished readying the AED, helped Shrike cut away Psion's costume so that the defibrillation pads could be positioned correctly on her chest, and then let him follow the automated system's instructions. The next few minutes passed in a nerve-wracking blur.

  “Good.” I noted, once the AED reassessed Psion's heart rhythm. “I could call for an ambulance if you prefer, or I could fly you all to the hospital. The latter option will be faster, and Mount Sinai Hospital in Brooklyn Heights doesn't unmask heroes or villains.”

  “Fly us,” he gasped, still out of breath from maintaining the cadence of chest compressions. “Please.”

  And so, we flew - I, under my own power, and the Knights borne by drone and invisible force-fields. The hospital was notified to expect us by text-message; given the number of superheroes and villains in New York City, this situation wasn't exactly unprecedented.

  Shrike was silent during the flight, staring at me with an uncertain, confused look on his face.

  When we landed, ER techs and nurses converged like a swarm. One brave woman even tried to talk me into taking off my armor so she could treat my wound. I told her that I required no assistance, and (in the time-honored tradition of humoring the heavily-armed, crazy supervillain) she diverted her focus to other patients.

  News of my presence at the hospital would circulate via social media, but it was highly unlikely that police or any other superheroes would intervene. Ever since the Paragons tried capturing Garrote while she was visiting her mother at Stanford Medical Center there had evolved an uneasy truce on hospital grounds. No one (not even most hardened criminals) wanted a repeat of that horror show.

  There was something comforting about watching a well-trained emergency-room team work. Through all the gore and pain, the staff were all focused upon a single goal. They cooperated, worked as fast as they could without adding to the risk of accident. It seemed to me as though they were all individual components of a beautifully programmed machine.

  Reluctantly, I tore my attention from the relaxing display; when I'd first encountered the heroes earlier in the evening, I'd tasked a program to dive through all online resources, television reports, and police records in order to gather detailed information on my opponents. Now, I idly perused the highlights as the medical personnel performed their tasks.

  The Brooklyn Knights' seven-month history was generally positive: no major scandals save for a few negative reactions to the incident in which Shrike left the monstrous Drago pinned to a wall like an entomologist's specimen. Given that Drago was a serial killer and rapist with sufficient regenerative abilities that he was probably fully healed before the police finished binding him for arrest, I had little sympathy. Members of the Knights responded politely to reporters and participated in interviews, but none appeared to be actively seeking publicity or fame. Every morsel of information that I could unearth indicated that they were...decent.

  I now suspected that the Brooklyn Knights were refugees from another Earth, an alternate world that Skullface breached during his failed assault on the United Nations building. I found no evidence that they were trying to return to their place of origin...There’d been no attempt to contact Skullface or view the wreckage of his Dimension Bomb. As near as I could determine from a focused data trawl, none of the local experts on inter-dimensional physics (in academia or among the cape-and-cowl crew) had been contacted. However the Knights had come to New York, they’d come as a group and chosen to stay.

  Something must have gone horribly wrong in their own dimension, that the Knights remained here instead of striving towards home. And yet...all evidence showed them to be so much more earnest and straightforward in their heroism than was common locally. There was a lesson to be learned from that, I was sure, some causal connection between setting and behavior. Context and content.

  I'd spent more than a decade as an active supervillain, playing foil to false idols who called themselves heroes and punishing the unworthy. Despite these efforts, my world's champions were still largely undeserving. Perhaps my mode of instruction was insufficiently challenging. Perhaps a shift in paradigm was appropriate: modifying the environment, altering the conditions. Change the world to change the world's protectors. It was an idea worth pondering...

  “Why are you doing this?” Shrike asked, interrupting my reverie. “Why help us?”

  I considered my answer carefully; for some reason, I didn't want to lie to this hero, this man who’d used his power to violently amputate my right arm less than an hour earlier. Strange.

  “When I put on this helmet, I do so with specific goals in mind. And I decide what price I'm willing to pay to achieve those goals. Her life was not a price that I was willing to pay in order to accomplish tonight's tasks,” I finally replied. Even the Mk 28’s vocoder struggled to remove vitriol from my voice when I added: “Also, I do not commit murder by accident!”

  That particular evil, I would leave to heroes.

  We were both silent for a while, watching the nurses wheel the last of the wounded Knights into the building. At my command, the combat-drones launched silently into the night sky.

  “I don't really understand you,” the Shrike said, “But thank you. I'm, uh, sorry about your arm.”

  “I'll live.” I looked down at the stump. “I'm sorry about yours.”

  “Wha-OWW!”

  My scepter—summoned once more—swatted across his forearm with sufficient force to crack his ulna. The noise was surprisingly loud, and one of the nurses rolled her eyes and began walking in our direction.

  “What the hell?!” Shrike looked more shocked than angry.

  “We had a deal. Your arm for your friends' safety,” I shrugged (which felt odd with only one arm, even in the powered-armor). “They're safe.”

  “I'm thirty feet away from painkillers and a cast, and when Wildcard wakes up he can heal me in fifteen minutes or so.” He cradled his broken limb to his chest, careful not to twist his wrist.

  “Yes.”

  “You broke my arm just to prove a point?” he winced; the initial shock had faded, and surprise was being replaced by pain. Still, his gaze remained affixed to my mask.

  “Deals are followed through upon or else they have no value. Also...in the interview you read, Valiant said that I don't break my word. He also said that I was a monster.” I triggered my anti-gravitics and began to float upwards. “Both of those statements are true. When the reporters come, be sure to remind them of the second part of Valiant's message.

  “We may face each other again someday, hero,” I called down to the wounded man. “If, in the interim, I've been forced to incinerate someone who expected mercy because of a tale you told...I'll be displeased.”

  “You're a lunatic!” Shrike yelled up at me as I began to soar away. And then, so quiet that I doubt that he intended for me to hear: “Thanks again.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

 
“I’m fine,” I informed Starnyx as soon as he answered his highly-encrypted phone.

  A swarm of medical automatons surrounded the gurney on which I was reclined, a humming and swirling dervish of blades, clamps, sponges and other surgical tools focused upon the stump of my shoulder. A surgical laser was carefully burning away flesh in a pattern that would increase the efficiency of repairs performed by the medical nanites once my right arm was reattached.

  The blended smell of disinfectant and cooking meat had been disturbing at first, but I was beginning to get used to the odor.

  “Okay…?” Eric yawned. “Where are you?”

  “I’m back in Boston,” I winced; a more significant cocktail of painkillers was coursing through my veins, but some discomfort remained. “I’m sorry, I forgot that you were asleep when I left.”

  “Nah, it’s almost morning. I can wake up. What’s up?”

  “I ran into some minor trouble on my way home,” I forced a chuckle. “It will probably make the news and I didn’t want you to worry.”

  “Hold on, let me get to a computer.” I heard tired, uncoordinated movement over the connection.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks.” Using my neural connection to the surgical control computer, I ordered one of the robots to add another dose of topical anesthetic. “Really, I’m fine.”

  “So, what happened?” Eric must have reached his desk, because I could hear the clacking as he typed on his keyboard.

  “I ran into the Brooklyn Knights.”