Fid's Crusade
Page 31
**Whisper,** I dodged one of Shrike's spikes; there was too much action, too many moving pieces on the board for me to truly have a picture of what was going on. My armor's combat algorithms guided me along as I sought to identify the greatest immediate threats. **How are things coming along?**
**Eleven packages already delivered!**
**Good work,** I commended, even though I’d hoped to have made greater progress. **Let me know when everything's ready.**
**I will,** she reassured me. **Watch out!**
And then the Sphinx was right before me, her expression a strange mix of fierce determination and resigned melancholy. There was no hope within her...merely the will to keep fighting as long as she could.
This was the first time that I'd met her face to face.
Sphinx's gold and black outfit was tight but not otherwise revealing, and her white half-length cape fluttered behind her as she landed. Long, wavy black hair framed her face like a mane; her features were strong, aquiline and beautiful. She was one of the true powers present: stronger and more durable than Titan but even faster and better trained. Her ability to fly and to attack from odd angles made her a force to be reckoned with.
But she was not Valiant, not quite. I struck, quick as a viper, and grabbed both her wrists.
“Enjoying your show?” I asked viciously, “Every drop of blood spilled here is on your hands!”
Sphinx twisted and managed to free one wrist from the Mk 35’s grasp, then followed with a quick jab to the Mk 35’s faceless mask. She freed her second hand during the fraction-of-a-second in which I flinched. Sphinx darted backwards, eyes narrowed furiously. “What do you know?”
“A great deal,” I sneered. “I know that you were aware of the Legion presence here, for years! I know that you’ve let them kill a lot of good men and women. And I know that you’ve been responsible for many deaths, yourself.”
“I was trying to save the planet!” she spat, then launched a series of spinning punches and kicks. But this was the kind of one-on-one fight the Mk 35 had been designed for; my combat algorithms compensated and allowed me to keep up with her attacks.
“No!” I hissed back at her, firing a series of force-blasts that splattered across her torso and left her completely unharmed. “You did nothing to save the Earth! You only tried to delay its fate.”
“The Legion was here.” All emotion left her voice and she spoke like a creature long dead. “They’ll take the planet, eventually.”
“You killed hundreds—fed people who trusted you to their mind-rapers!—to buy a few years peace?”
“It’s a large planet…Millions of people die every year,” she smiled grimly. “Because of me, those millions died free.”
“And billions more could die tomorrow because you did nothing to stop this.” I summoned the warstaff and spun it to block her sudden series of careful attacks. Distraction and malaise had done nothing to dim her combat skills.
“The Legion was here!” she repeated, angrily. “’Delay’ was the only option.”
“Only because you didn’t try anything else,” I growled back at her. “You should have rallied your troops, should have let your teammates help you come up with a plan. Reached out to scientists, to politicians, to the military!”
“The Legion has telepathic spies!” she countered defensively, picking up a downed flagpole and swinging it like a bat; my armor’s combat algorithms parried smoothly. “If we started preparing, they would have known. The attack would have started earlier!”
“You sacrificed hundreds— thousands! —as a gift to the dead, but you abandoned the living,” my voice dipped to a dangerous rumble as I chanced an accusation for which I had no proof, only strong suspicions: “You gave up heroes to the Legion's control. The Red Ghost. Cloner. How many others? You should have fought!”
“I would have lost. What choice did I have?” she snarled, panting slightly, still trying to get through my defenses with textbook-perfect martial-arts strikes. “If you know so much, what would you have done differently?!?”
“Would I have killed so many, just to gain a few short years of time? Perhaps. But I’m a villain,” I laughed darkly. “You spent last weekend signing autographs for children that you expected to die young or live as slaves. Good job, hero.”
Sphinx was shocked into momentary inaction, taking a step back and letting her defenses slip. I did nothing to capitalize and, after a moment, she noticed that no other heroes had been joining her attempts to subdue me for some time.
The other gathered heroes had fallen away, backed off with expressions of wide eyed disgust. My microdrones had been relaying audio of my conversation with Sphinx, and it seemed as though most of the brightly colored champions had the same opinions as I regarding her choices. Face to face with a heroine’s hypocrisy, they looked away and focused on the true enemy; the Legion, and those few who were under the Legion’s control.
I heard the distant crack of a familiar sonic boom.
**Whisper!** I sent urgently **What’s the status?**
**Nineteen packages sent!**
I growled helplessly. Valiant had implied that he was among the few whose powers protected against Legion’s control; if he joined the battle, the officers would know that the Mercer-Tallon building was doomed. The agents might transmit their messages to the Legion fleet when he arrived, and we’d lose a window of opportunity.
**Be ready. Nineteen may have to be sufficient.**
**Mm!**
And then Valiant was between us, striking the earth like a thunderbolt.
“Damnit, Sphinx!” he started, angrily. “I’ve been watching the news, I couldn’t stay away any longer. What did y—“
He paused, and I watched his eyes go glassy. Valiant’s left hand twitched with the beginning of a tremor, and a bead of sweat formed at his brow. “What did…you...I-”.
I turned to stare at Sphinx, incredulous. “You lied to Valiant about being immune to Legion control?!?”
“It was necessary!” she retorted weakly, watching her friend’s expression shift to one of tortured pain.
“I’m sorry,” Valiant whimpered.
And then I was thrown backwards more than a hundred feet to bisect a thankfully-empty school bus.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The coffin is too small.
Bobby had been getting big. Eleven is practically a teenager! When he jumped on me, the breath would explode from my lungs like a bellows. When he grabbed my hand and tugged, the firm jerk immediately distracted me from whatever problem I'd been pondering. Bobby was even getting too large to carry on my shoulders.
The priest says his words and Bobby's friends are crying. There are parents here too, looking lost, and comforting their children as best they can. The school's homeroom teacher is here as well, her jaw clenched tight and eyes glassy with unshed tears. My brother talks about her all the time. Talked.
It doesn't make sense. Why is the coffin so small?
Someone is talking to me and I say something in return. The words aren't real; my lips are moving on their own, running on autopilot. I must be saying the right thing because the priest grips my shoulder and offers a grim, compassionate smile.
I'm directed to place the first handful of earth. I do. A residue of soil sticks to my hand and I rub it between my fingers, thinking of sandcastles. Others walk to the edge of the grave and scatter more dirt. It's hard to watch the children, with their wet faces and tiny hands and awkward movements. They look broken. But I stand and I look anyway. I'm broken too.
Mom and Dad aren't buried here; their graves are more than a hundred miles away, near the old house. Bobby lived with me in Boston and all of his friends were here. If I'd brought Bobby to Mom and Dad, it would have been just me and a priest and a coffin that was too small. Imagining that scene makes me want to scream...but my lips are moving, saying something kind to a little girl named Lisa. I think I made a robotic pony for her once.
She hugs me, crying, and leaves
in her mother's arms.
The weather is beautiful; warm but with a slight breeze. I don't like being outside in a suit on hot days; sweat makes my skin sticky. The sky is pure cerulean, clear from horizon to horizon, and I can feel Bobby's homeroom teacher trembling when she takes my hands in her own. There is grit on her hands, too.
Grave-dirt doesn't wash off. Not really. It can be scrubbed away from skin but the stain on your soul is forever.
I stand, directionless, and time passes.
Everyone has left, a slow trickle of dark clad mourners pouring away from the epicenter of my pain. It's just me and the cemetery caretaker now. The priest is gone, too; I must have said something to him.
“Sir? Should I start filling in the grave?”
“Just a moment.” Unsteadily, I stumble to the precipice.
There is a glistening, metallic action figure on top of the too-small coffin. It's partially covered in dirt; one of Bobby's friends must have dropped it there, left it in what they had thought would be a kind reminder.
“Could you get that for me? It was Bobby's. I...” Words stick in my throat.
“Of course. Give me a moment.”
I turn away. The breeze has paused, the sun is beating down on me, and the caretaker places the action figure into my hand. I walk away and, behind me, I hear the sound of a shovel scraping into the soil. Filling my brother's grave.
The plot next to Bobby is reserved for me.
Part of me longs to fill it: to stop hurting, to accept what I deserve, to make sure that my little brother isn't alone. The desire to leave the sun behind makes my chest ache, but I know that I will not allow it for myself.
I'm gripping the toy so hard that the plastic tears through my skin. Bronze is out there, still, and there are people who think that he's a hero.
I can't rest yet. There's still so much that I need to do.
◊◊◊
A cocktail of stimulants tore me from unconsciousness, and my mouth was filled with bile. The Mk 35's shields had been re-configured to handle large numbers of simultaneous impacts; Valiant's punch had overwhelmed that system, rattled me senseless and battered parts of me that I hadn't known could be bruised. System alarm messages warred for my attention against medical alerts. With shields and inertial-displacement functions overwhelmed, the extraordinarily rigid and unyielding orichalcum armor plates had transmitted the shock-wave to sensitive components housed within. Vast swathes of systems were damaged; most concerning, the autopilot and predictive combat systems could no longer take control of the armor. I was fortunate that direct neural controls were still working flawlessly, at least.
I sat up painfully, shifting aside the shattered remains of a school-bus bench-seat, and evaluated the battleground. The last of my medium-duty combat drones had been disabled. Too many heroes were down, and too many more were beginning to retreat. They had found the courage to face an alien threat and Doctor Fid, but the mind-controlled Valiant was a force of nature. Many of those who were capable of it fled.
When the battlefield cleared, the Legion officers would transmit word to their superiors and the armada's response would become infinitely more difficult to predict.
**Whisper?** I asked mentally **How is progress?**
**Twenty packages delivered,** she answered quietly, mental voice trembling. **Should I go active?**
**No.** I took a shaky breath. **How long to send the other six?**
**Two-hundred sixty-seven seconds.**
**Okay,** I started re-calibrating my shields again, and triggered an internal system to fill my mouth with water to wash away the taste of acid and blood. **Keep at it. Thank you!**
I wrote a quick firewall to make sure that my armor's medical telemetry wasn't being forwarded to any system that Whisper might be monitoring, then struggled to my feet. The warstaff, summoned reflexively, was a reassuring presence in my grasp.
Doctor Fid could keep the Legion and Valiant occupied for four and a half minutes.
I took careful aim and braced myself, then unleashed a maximum-power particle-beam blast at the Mercer-Tallon building's footings. The air itself ignited from the force, boiled into plasma then pulled forward by the vacuum to flash-liquify a car-sized section of pavement. Much of the force splattered off of the force-fields, but enough penetrated that the building visibly shook and windows shattered.
The mind-controlled Valiant had been wrestling with Cuboid's crude (but moderately powerful) android body. A moment after my strike had landed, he turned towards me; I had earned the Legion's attention.
I was already charging forward, flight systems catapulting me forward at maximum thrust. Even with the inertial-dampeners operating, the acceleration crushed the breath from my chest. Were he unencumbered, Valiant could have dodged or rolled with the blow...but the gunmetal-gray robotic Cuboid held the African-American hero still for the crucial fraction of a second.
I pulsed the Mk 35's recently-implemented density-manipulators to collide with the literal force of a speeding freight train. Cuboid was shattered from the impact (I was certain that he had spare bodies stored somewhere; also, Whisper said that he was mean. So...no energy was wasted upon guilt) but Valiant and I tumbled forward to ram into the building's force-field.
I'd landed sideways on my back, and I could look upwards to see the edifice again shake; one of Cloner had been atop the roof and was thrown clear, arms windmilling helplessly as he began his final plummet.
Valiant grabbed for my throat with both hands and I countered, using my staff to lever his grip away before he could manage any damage. I followed with a high energy strobe, intended more to induce temporary blindness than to damage. The large hero jerked his head back; I used anti-gravitics to jump up and generate just enough space to swing my staff like a hockey-stick, and the weapon's trajectory arced upwards to catch Valiant squarely between his legs.
By now, all reporters and camera crew must surely have retreated from the danger zone...but four news-camera drones were still within range. This was a battle to determine humanity's fate, but that one moment of footage would, I was sure, be the one destined to be downloaded and re-posted to the internet. For my own part, I merely hoped very much that Valiant's discomfort was transmitted to the Legion officer that was puppeting the hero's body. Valiant made a mewling noise and collapsed.
I used my momentary reprieve to fire medium-yield kinetic blasts at the other mind-control victims, separating them from the heroes they were fighting. The insect-garbed hero had somehow rescued the falling Cloner, and I used an ultrasonic attack to thoroughly stun them both. A focused barrage of plasma-cannon fire from within the Mercer-Tallon building was my reward; the impact drove me to one knee, but I was able to use my staff for leverage to keep from being knocked over outright.
Titan threw a motorcycle at me as I stood (which I ducked under) and Aeon discharged the single-most powerful force-blast that I'd even seen her wield. I was pounded upon the torso and, again, pressed backwards...but the Mk 35 heavy-combat armor was able to absorb the impact without further damage. I pointed my palm at her and replied with a low-yield particle-beam, but her force-field was already in place by the time I fired.
The battle was chaotic; without my auto-pilot engaged, I was unable to keep track of every movement. Lasers and bullets and shrapnel pinged off my force-fields and occasionally penetrated to glance off the orichalcum armor plating...I wasn't taking much damage, but it was certainly disorienting. Which is probably why I hadn't noticed that Valiant had regained his footing.
I didn't feel the impact. There was just a blur of movement and then blackness.
◊◊◊
There's a fresh motor-oil stain on the concrete in front of the hanger-door to the left; whoever is renting that unit probably is storing a car in there. Maybe they are restoring it, working on it here on the weekends. You aren't supposed to do that, I know, but some people still do.
There are eight drive-up storage containers connected in this row. The one
on the left contains a car and I can't help but wonder what the others might conceal. Unused sports equipment, old documents, furniture, boxes of books? What do people put in storage? Things that they don't need enough to keep in their home, but that they are too emotionally attached to throw away.
The unit in front of me houses a supervillain.
I haven't been back here in five years, not since Bronze died and I returned to MIT. If I unlock the door, the space will be cramped with heavy crates resting on pallets, likely coated in a thin layer of dust. Everything will be labeled with inoffensive titles: 'Kitchen goods', 'Old oven', 'Dining room'. One set of crates is labeled 'Power tools #1' through 'Power tools #4', and in those boxes will be the disassembled remains of Doctor Fid.
If I unlock the door...
Do I want this, really? I haven't given notice to my employers yet; I can still change my mind, still go back to my comfortable research with Doctor Ichiro and watch his son play with action-figures in the corner. I can teach physics or engineering or math, and audit classes in whatever subject catches my attention. If I leave the door locked, I could spend the rest of my life as a safe, boring, sadder and lonelier version of the Terry Markham that had been Bobby's brother.
But if I unlock the door, it's forever.
The Doctor is alive in a way that I'm just not. He has a sense of purpose! If I put on that faceless mask for even a moment, I'll never be able to set the armor aside again. A half-decade was sufficient to teach me what a more traditional life will be like. Staying at MIT would be the easy choice, simple and apathetic.
The key is in my hand and I make my decision. I know who I want to be.
◊◊◊
Another adrenaline cocktail was poured into my veins and Whisper was screaming wordlessly in my mind. I dry-heaved and convulsed, eyes watering as I tried to gulp down air.