Rogues

by Darius Brasher

  Isaac clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Now that that’s decided, let’s talk about the most important thing of all—our team name. The Sentinels is out, of course. Too much baggage. We need something both descriptive and that’s got pizzazz. Now I’m just spitballing here, but how about Myth’s Legends of Tomorrow?”

  “No,” I said.

  “The Mythcreants?”

  “No,” Ninja said. The fabric around her mouth twitched.

  “The Mythadventurers?” Isaac suggested hopefully.

  “No,” both Ninja and I said.

  CHAPTER 30

  “I’ve always wanted to own a jet,” Isaac said. “Ever since I was little. Who says dreams don’t come true?”

  “This is not your jet,” Ninja said. “Since it used to belong to the Sentinels, it’s my jet now. You’re just a passenger. I bet you’re one of those guys who sleeps with a woman once and then thinks he owns her.”

  “I know it’s hard to not think about sex when someone as handsome and dashing as I am is around. Even Omega’s heterosexuality succumbed to my charms the other day when we were on the space station. But try harder to keep your mind out of the gutter and on our mission to defeat Doctor Alchemy. As a martial artist, you should be more disciplined. Besides, I already have a girlfriend. She doesn’t share well with others.”

  “Imagine my disappointment,” Ninja said.

  Ninja piloted the jet using an oversized joystick which stuck up between her legs. Its design looked like a video game had inspired it. Sensors, gauges, buttons, switches, and flashing lights densely dotted the cockpit in front of her. Wisps of clouds streaked by the cockpit windows as we zoomed through the air.

  Isaac sat next to Ninja in the co-pilot’s chair. Both he and I had our costumes and cowls on because Ninja did not know our secret identities. Even with his cowl hiding most of his features and though he was trying to be cool about it, I knew Isaac well enough to know he was as excited to fly in a Sentinels’ jet as a kid was to sit on Santa’s lap. The Sentinels had been the Hero team before their disgrace.

  I sat in one of the five wing-back chairs behind Ninja and Isaac. Unlike Isaac, I was not as excited as a kid in Santa’s lap because, like so much of the Sentinels’ technology, this state of the art jet had been designed by Mechano. I didn’t need to check my list twice to know he had been far naughtier than he had been nice.

  We weren’t in Santa’s lap, but we were in the lap of luxury. The leather chairs we were strapped into were as soft as a baby’s bottom. They vibrated ever so gently as the jet ripped through the sky at an absurd speed. Behind the Sentinels’ seven chairs was a long couch that hugged one side of the jet’s cabin; a small conference table with a holographic projector in the middle of it was on the other side. Everything was in shades of tasteful browns and ivory.

  While the inside of the jet looking like something out of a braggadocious rap video, its outside looked militaristic. With its V-shaped design, the black jet looked like the smaller, chubbier cousin of the United States’ B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. The distinctive S-shaped golden logo of the Sentinels was on the bottom of each of the plane’s wings. The jet’s various armaments made it a flying fortress.

  The fact I was in a flying fortress, the fact I had use of my powers again, and the fact two other Heroes were with me did not make me any less nervous to be flying towards Doctor Alchemy’s lair. No, “nervous” did not quite explain the hard knot forming in the pit of my stomach. Scared was more like it.

  The average person thought Heroes were fearless. Maybe some of the dumber ones were. I for one was always nervous when I headed into potential combat. More so when I had been fresh out of the Academy, less so after I donned the Omega suit, and even less so than that as I became adept in the use of my enhanced powers. However, my skirmish with Doctor Alchemy and the Revengers had taught me that, despite all my power, I was not invulnerable. I was more nervous now sitting here rocketing toward Doctor Alchemy’s lair than I had been the first time I went on patrol with the Old Man.

  According to Isaac, who had been far more aware of his surroundings than I when he had flown us off Doctor Alchemy’s island, the island was located within the Ring of Fire, named that because it was the Pacific Ocean basin where a lot of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occurred. The three of us intended to capture and bring Doctor Alchemy to justice if he was there when we arrived; we would merely liberate his subjects if he was not.

  I was a jumble of nerves with a healthy scoop of fear on top because Doctor Alchemy had to know I was coming. After what he had done to me, surely he did not think I would let him roam around scot-free. The only ace in the hole I had was that I was not returning alone. Capturing Doctor Alchemy was one of the reasons Isaac and I had recruited Ninja. She had fought him before. Against someone as vicious and erratic as he was, we figured we’d need all the help we could get. We would have to track down the other Revengers too, but Doctor Alchemy was first on the to-do list because he was dangerous in a way the other Revengers were not.

  In addition to being afraid for myself, I was afraid of what Doctor Alchemy might have done to Oliver. Isaac and I had left my communicator watch on the table of my torture chamber. Since Oliver had been the only person who visited me in Doctor Alchemy’s absence, Doctor Alchemy would deduce Oliver had brought the watch to me. I shuddered to think of what Doctor Alchemy might have done to the old man as punishment. I prayed we would be in time to rescue him from the vicious Rogue’s clutches. Or I should say “try to rescue” Oliver. The Revengers defeating me had severely shaken my confidence. I was deathly afraid that instead of liberating Doctor Alchemy’s subjects, we would instead add three superpowered ones to their number.

  We were getting closer to the island’s coordinates. It felt like going back to an alley where I had been jumped and beaten half to death, not knowing if my muggers would still be there when I arrived. Theo the farm boy would never have dreamed of deliberately going back to the scene of where had been peeled like a peach. Theo the Hero wasn’t overjoyed by the idea, either. But, as the Old Man had been fond of saying, “A Hero runs toward the danger that a regular person would run from.” Sometimes I wished I hadn’t paid so much attention to his lessons.

  “We’re here,” Ninja said. She tilted the joystick down and back. The low hum of the jet’s engines changed in pitch as we slowed and lost altitude, dropping below the cloud cover. The ocean burst into view. It glittered like a blue sapphire in the sun. We hovered above the ocean, still high in the sky.

  We stared through the cockpit windows. “According to the coordinates you gave me Myth, Doctor Alchemy’s island should be right there.” Ninja pointed through the cockpit window at the water below. Nothing was there. Not a speck of land marred the blue vista. Water was as far as the eye could see. “Are you sure you got the coordinates right?”

  Isaac looked at her like it was a stupid question. She did not know him like I did. Despite the fact he would likely sit up in his casket and crack jokes at his own funeral, he knew his business. I said, “If this is the spot Myth says he rescued me from, then this is the spot he rescued me from.”

  “Then why is there nothing to see here but the deep blue sea?” Ninja demanded. “Nothing’s showing up on radar or the jet’s other sensors either.”

  “It’s gotta be here,” Isaac insisted. “An island doesn’t just jump up and disappear like a guy caught in bed with someone else’s wife.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” I unbuckled my seat restraints and shrugged out of them. “I’ll go outside and use my telekinetic touch to see if I can find anything.”

  “Why can’t you do that from here?” Ninja asked.

  “It’s easier if I do the scan with nothing around me. Why do you think I go to the top of the UWant Building all the time?”

  “I thought it was because you wanted to look taller,” Isaac said.

  I ignored Isaac from long ingrained habit. I went to the center of the cabin, near the conferenc
e table. Drawing on the fifty-cent tour Ninja had given us before we took off, I hit a button on the panel mounted on the side of the table. The circle I stood on dropped down like an elevator car. It lowered me into a gleaming cylindrical chamber under the cabin. The opening overhead to the cabin closed with a hiss. My ears popped as the chamber equalized the air pressure between the chamber and outside the jet. Then the circle I stood on dropped open like a trapdoor. I fell out of the chamber, down toward the glittering water below. I caught myself with my powers, and levitated a few dozen feet under the hovering jet. The opening I dropped out of sealed shut behind me.

  Okay, that’s actually pretty cool, I thought despite my reflexive prejudice against anything Mechano related. Sometimes it was hard to not give the devil his due.

  The wind whistled like a distant train as it whipped around me. The jet hovered silently, held up by a propulsion system I probably would not understand if I studied it for a decade. I was a chastened Hero and torture survivor, not an engineer. I lifted my hands in what Isaac would call my best zombie impersonation, activated my powers, and reached out with my telekinetic touch. I scanned the area below where Doctor Alchemy’s island hideout was supposed to be.

  I wasn’t at all surprised to find the island right where Isaac said it would be. Though I still could not see it with my eyes, thanks to my powers, it rose up out of the surrounding water like an enormous rocky kraken in my mind’s eye. Doctor Alchemy had obviously done something to render it invisible both to the naked eye and to the jet’s sensors. I had no idea how he pulled it off. Some sort of super-advanced stealth technology maybe, or something else altogether. Again, I was no engineer. Maybe he had simply terrified it into invisibility.

  I was about to activate the earbud communicator Ninja had given me to tell the others my discovery when my powers shrieked for my attention. Two invisible objects had left the island’s surface. They shot toward us like bats out of hell.

  SAMs—surface-to-air missiles. I didn’t have to be an engineer to know they were on their way to blow us to bits.

  CHAPTER 31

  I hastily erected a force bubble around both the jet and me. The first missile slammed into it. The missile exploded on impact. The second one did the same an instant later. Fireballs engulfed us. The inferno competed with the sun in brightness.

  But only for an instant. I sucked up the energy from the blasts like a thirsty sponge, ending the light show almost as quickly as it had begun. The explosions would have deafened me had I not been careful to make sure the force field was completely impermeable. Not even sound waves had penetrated it.

  I swooped down toward the island, still maintaining the force bubble around the motionless jet while I erected my personal shield around myself. Ninja said something in my ear. She sounded awfully calm for someone who had almost been blasted out of the sky by invisible weapons. Then again, this was not her first rodeo. My mind otherwise occupied, her words barely registered.

  In seconds, my telekinetic touch found what I was looking for below: two mobile SAM batteries, one on each side of the invisible island. The batteries looked a bit like dump trucks, only instead of them having a dump bed, missiles stuck up like pins in a pincushion on a mechanized platform on either side of an operator’s chair. Each battery was manned by a two-person crew, one man, one woman, all dressed like the people I had encountered in Doctor Alchemy’s torture chamber. Despite the fact they had just shot at us, I knew they were as much victims of Doctor Alchemy as I had been. I was careful to not hurt them when I yanked them away from the SAM batteries. I flung them through the air like discarded wads of paper. Once they were far enough away from the batteries, I channeled the energy I had absorbed from the missile explosions. A blast of energy lanced out of my eyes, striking the first battery. It exploded into a raging bonfire with a boom they might have heard in Atlantis. I turned my head slightly. The second battery followed the first one into noisy, fiery oblivion.

  I did not detect any other threats on the island’s surface. I activated the earbud transmitter. I guided Ninja and the jet toward a flat part of the beach surrounding the island’s volcano, not far from where the fire of one of the destroyed SAM batteries raged. Once the jet and I descended close to the island surface, the seemingly empty space the island occupied shimmered, like the air above a patch of highway on a hot day. Silently, the island appeared in the middle of the ocean as if by magic.

  The jet and I landed on the beach between the water and the burning SAM battery. The other fire was on the other side of the island; black smoke from it rose above the island’s tree line. I looked around. This was my first time seeing the island in the light of day.

  The air was humid and warm, but not uncomfortably so. The tang of salt water was in the air, mixing with the acrid smell of burning rubber and plastic. I stood on sand as black as Doctor Alchemy’s heart. The black sand beach was so wide, I wouldn’t be able to throw a rock across it from the edge of the water to where it ended at the tree line. Thanks to my earlier telekinetic touch recon, I knew this beach of black sand surrounded the entire large island like a thick black snake eating itself. The ocean gently lapped at one side of the beach; tall palm trees like upside down giant feather dusters lined the other side. Beyond the trees was a thick tangle of vegetation. Past that loomed the volcano, green with vegetation at its base, black and brown with rocks as it climbed high into the air. White smoke puffed slowly but steadily out of its top. Cawing seagulls circled overhead.

  If it weren’t for the smell, sight, and sound of the fires from the SAM batteries and the knowledge this was the home of a notorious Rogue and his gang of mind-controlled minions, this place would be a latter-day Garden of Eden. If I ran across any snakes here, I knew not to eat any apples it offered.

  Ninja and Isaac exited the jet from a ramp telescoping from its side. It noiselessly retracted back into the jet as soon as they dismounted. The scabbard slung diagonally across Ninja’s chest was empty. She had her katana in her hand and at the ready. Her eyes were vigilant, alert for any sign of danger. Isaac was more relaxed. Unlike Ninja, he knew I’d never let them land much less disembark had I not been certain we were in no immediate danger.

  “I’ve never seen an all-black beach before,” Isaac said. His eyes twinkled behind his cowl. “It’s much prettier than an all-white one. Something else the racist white power structure and global conspiracy has been keeping from us. The Rothschild family’s doing, no doubt. I wonder why the sand is blacker than I am.”

  “They’re tiny basalt fragments, probably from the volcano’s periodic eruptions,” Ninja said in a clipped tone. All business, quite the contrast from how casual Isaac was. She glanced at the burning SAM battery, then looked pointedly at me. “Subtle. If Doctor Alchemy is home and didn’t already know we were here, he surely does now.”

  “Maybe you’d prefer if I had let them blow you to kingdom come.”

  “Easy, Omega. I was commenting, not criticizing.” It didn’t sound like it. Regardless, she was right. I could have neutralized the SAM batteries without being so noisy about it. I had used a sledgehammer when a scalpel was more appropriate. Being on this island again was affecting my judgment, making me trigger-happy.

  Isaac surveyed the volcano with his hands on his hips. He pursed his lips thoughtfully as he looked up at it. “That thing’s huge. And everything looks different in the light of day. I don’t think I can find my way back to Doctor Alchemy’s lair in there without a sign pointing the way that reads ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’ And Omega’s communicator we left behind has been deactivated, so that’s no help. Omega, can you . . .” he trailed off, wiggling his fingers in front of himself like a magician.

  “I’ve already tried my telekinetic touch,” I said. “The rock in the volcano is too dense for me to penetrate.”

  “Some might say the same about my head, especially when I’m stymied like I am now.” Isaac shook his head. “If you two have any bright ideas on how to find Doctor A
lchemy’s lair without me wandering around inside the volcano like a ghost whose house has burned down, I’m all ears.” He glanced up at the bright sun. “Let’s hurry. I won’t be able to pass the brown paper bag test if I stay out here much longer. If I’d known, I would have brought sunscreen.”

  “Way ahead of you,” I said. With a tiny gesture from me, one of the people who had manned the nearby SAM battery lifted off the beach and came sailing toward us like he dangled from a clothesline I was pulling on. The other three SAM personnel were sprawled out on the black sand, unconscious thanks to me carefully applying pressure to their carotid arteries while the jet landed. I had tied their hands and feet together with vines so they would not make nuisances of themselves when they woke up. The one floating toward us I had kept conscious but immobilized on the off chance we needed to question someone. Despite the mistake I made in so sloppily destroying the SAM batteries, I was not a complete Heroic neophyte.

  I set the man down on the sand. The brown-haired, nondescript man stood immobilized, held upright and still by my powers, though I did free his head so he could speak. He did not. He just stared at us with the same hazy, slightly euphoric look on his face Doctor Alchemy’s other subjects had. He had on the black pants and turquoise tunic with a yellow sash tied around the waist Doctor Alchemy’s other male subjects wore.

  Isaac waved a hand in the man’s face, snapping his fingers right in front of the man’s eyes. The man did not blink and kept the same vacant look on his face. It reminded me of the dumb look my Uncle Charles’ cows used to give me when I approached their pasture—they had known I was there, but could not have cared less.

  “This guy looks as high as a giraffe’s vagina,” Isaac said.

  “Colorful,” Ninja said.

  “That too,” Isaac said, eyeing the man’s outfit.

  “We’re more likely to get straight answers out of a crack addict than this guy,” I said, disgusted. So much for being pleased with myself for preserving someone for questioning.