Arsenal Reloaded (Full Metal Superhero Book 8)

by Jeffery H. Haskell

  The Emjet screams through the air. Epic puts a map on the display showing our progress and a countdown clock. Even at full speed we are going to be cutting it close. Like Epic said, this guy knows what my tech can do.

  ARC clearly knows about Carlos and Pythia, otherwise why have us meet on top of their base at Delphi? This is the hardest part of my plan. I really don’t want things to go sideways. Of course, since when does what I want match what actually happens?

  I check my outfit one more time to make sure it’s all tucked in and tight. I’m wearing my titanium-tungsten weave so at least if they take a shot at me before I hand over my stuff, I’m more likely to survive.

  We reach apogee and the Emjet angles down, coming in hard and fast. Even with my shielding she shakes as the front-end heats up.

  “Epic,” I say as the plane shudders, “is this... this is going to work, right?”

  We have yet to fail. That does not mean it will not happen, but it has not happened yet.

  “That wasn’t exactly the pep talk I was looking for,” I tell him.

  Amelia, you are my creator and my friend. I will forever stand by you. It is not that I think you will never fail. I have faith in you. Faith that you will always do the right thing. You will always be that little girl who created me in the hopes of finding her parents. You are a good woman. In other words, this will work.

  I smile. That was more what I was looking for. “Thanks, buddy. I needed that.”

  The jet screams into the atmosphere over Greece, her engines reducing thrust to let atmospheric drag slow us down.

  We are getting pinged by the Greek military. They want to know who we are and what we are doing in their air space. Correction, they no longer care, they have scrambled jets to intercept.

  “Awesome. Well, they will likely be too late. Drop us down to three hundred feet, asap.”

  There is something supremely unnerving about diving in an aircraft and not being at the controls. Not that I know how to fly a plane—beyond flight sims, anyway. Usually, when I’m flying toward the ground at Mach Three I’m in a suit and in control.

  The Emjet pulls up and skirts the mountains and valleys of this part of Greece. If Epic ever wanted a second career, he’d make a helluva fighter pilot!

  Five seconds... we are coming up on Delphi. They are already here.

  We clear the last mountain range and shoot over the city at window-shaking speed before Epic throws the engines into hard reverse. I jerk forward in my harness as we slow down to a hover in a few seconds.

  Two of the VTOLS they use are parked. A good fifty android soldiers are spread around the ruins, weapons out. Then there are those guys...

  “Scumbags!” I yell at them through the window. They are huddled around in a circle, hiding something from me.

  Amelia, the Death Dealers are here, and they have picked up Blade to replace Colossus.

  “Yeah, I have eyes, Epic. Land us and we’ll get this over with. You see the hostages?”

  Yes. He has them under the wing of the closest ship. Amelia, these are priceless, irreplaceable ruins, if there is going to be a fight, we should try very hard for it to change locations as fast as possible.

  “Understood. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. You ready for this?”

  I am.

  The ship shakes as it comes to rest, and the whole frame lowers so I can disembark without going down a ramp. Unbuckling, I shift into the wheelchair, make sure the breaks are on and then pick up the duffel bag with the metal in it, along with a large external hard drive. After all, he needs to think I have kept my end of the bargain.

  Boy, is he going to be in for a surprise.

  I roll over to the door. It slides up and I wheel out onto the rough ground. God, am I sick of this place. If there was one place I never want to see again, it’s Delphi.

  One of the androids is twenty feet away. The Death Dealers are behind him, spread out like they are waiting for a fight. The ground has paths and Epic was nice enough to land on one so I could not look weak as I make my way. I’m panting by the time I’m sitting in front of them.

  The sheer hatred on the merc’s faces is enough to make me wince.

  “You should kill her right now,” Hand Cannon says to the leader. He wears his stupid beard and open logger shirt. The android turns and makes a silencing motion.

  “Ms. Lockheart, as I expected, you have the metal and your tech?” he asks.

  I nod, dropping the bag to the ground in front of me. “My parents?”

  “I keep my word,” he says. He doesn’t make a motion, but they start walking forward.

  “I do hope you aren’t counting on your friends to rescue you. I’ve sealed this area off to Ms. Petrenelli’s brand of teleporting. I’ve also taken into account your friend with the shield. If he so much as passes overhead in orbit...” The android turns and gestures toward Thrash. The Death Dealers spread out and reveal he’s holding Pythia by the throat, while Blade has one of her plasma swords pressed against the woman’s belly.

  “Bastard,” I mutter.

  “Such language,” the android says smugly.

  I figured he’d use his tech to keep Kate from teleporting, which is why our plan never relied on her to be here.

  Amelia, I am picking up a wireless signal and repeater. I am going to hack it. If these androids are under control from a central location, similar to how I used to connect to your armor, we might be able to exploit it.

  “Okay. You’ve got what you want, we’ll just be going...” I glance over to see “John” and “Hope’s” progress. They are still only halfway to the plane.

  “Not so fast. You are a respectable woman, Ms. Lockheart... may I call you Amelia? But I don’t trust you for a second.” He kneels down to the bag and picks up the metal contained within. I can’t see his face through the black ninja headwrap they all wear.

  If he has any kind of sensors or material analyzers on his androids he’ll know pretty quick—

  He shakes his head while making a tsking noise. “I thought you were smarter than this.”

  “Did you take classes to become this annoying, or does it come naturally?” I ask.

  In a flash he jerks up and pulls his plasma pistol and fires.

  “No!” I shout.

  Dad slumps over and Mom drops on top of him, trying to protect him with her body.

  He looks at my parents then at me, then the ship. “Something isn’t right,” he says.

  “Wow,” I say, dropping my false emotions. “That took you forever,” I say dragging out the last word. “Do you think you’re the first person to come after my family?”

  “I don’t know what game you are playing, but if you’re so cold as to allow me to kill your parents and your heart rate doesn’t move, either you’re not Amelia Lockheart or...” he jerks his head over to the man he just shot.

  One of the things I really, really missed about Animetal was having my HUD on me at all times. No glasses or goggles, just my eyes and Epic. Also, I loved triggering things with my thoughts instead of voice commands.

  The Animetal erupts out of me and in less time than it takes to stand up, I’m in the MK IX. “Surprise mother fragger!” Two kinetic lances fire from my outstretched arms. One hits the smug android, sending him flying into Blade, the other hits Thrash in the forehead, snapping his head back and forcing him to stumble.

  “Fleet, Pythia, Lux, disable their ships!”

  My “parents” were actually Fleet and Lux, disguised using her ability to control light and shape. Combined with a rudimentary voice modulator programmed with my parents’ voices, they were flawless.

  The illusion drops and Fleet is a blur of motion. His blue and white costume crackles with electricity as he covers the distance to Pythia.

  “Sorry,” he says throwing her over his shoulder. He disappears, running away as fast as he can while carrying her as a passenger.

  The sound of discharging plasma guns fills the air as the androids open fire on
Lux. The whole reason I picked these two was that they were the least likely to die. Fleet can dodge just about anything, and Lux... well, I don’t think anything can hurt her.

  The plasma bolts pass right through her as she rises up into the sky. Her white uniform with its yellow starburst shines in the sun as she absorbs the light. Her eyes glow bright yellow and her hair flows out behind her in a nimbus of blonde tendrils. Then she starts firing.

  She points her hands like a knife at the first ship and a laser-like beam jets out and cuts right through the first wing then the second.

  “Hand Cannon, deal with her!” the lead Android says.

  I leap to the side as the logger grins, pointing his hand at me. “Nope,” I say.

  He looks confused, then he’s punched a hundred times by Fleet. While Hand Cannon has enormous firepower, he isn’t physically strong. Fleet’s rapid-fire blows take him down in a mass of broken bones.

  The boom from above tells me Rocket has joined the fray. I take to the skies; the whine of the four Emdrives in the suit deafens those around me like a fighter jet taking off. I shoot up into the air as Rocket comes in low and fast. A fireball the size of a house hits the ground where I had stood, vaporizing the leader android and throwing the rest of his team to the ground.

  “Epic, status?”

  Amelia, this code... I have seen it before. On Ericsson’s space station. I think this base code was part of his security AI.

  “What? Are you frickin kidding me?” I yell as I turn hard and throw a mass of tungsten balls, like a shotgun, right into Rocket’s path. They are only moving at a few hundred miles an hour—not like a mass driver but more like crowd control for supers with tough skin. His aura flares but he can’t get hot enough to melt them before impact. His powers cut out and he crashes down the twenty feet to the ground with a bone-cracking thump.

  “Are we ever going to be free of that—” I’m interrupted by a giant rock slamming into my kinetic shields. Thrash has regained his footing and he’s throwing chunks at me. I really didn’t want to hurt the area, —it is historically and culturally as important as any spot on Earth—but it isn’t like they are giving me a choice.

  It may be that there is not a person behind ARC, but this AI.

  “That would explain a few things.” I check on Fleet; he’s busy fighting Blade. She’s fast, swiping her sword at him. He stays unpredictable, never holding still or moving through the same space twice in a row. Suddenly, he runs around her waving his arms like a butterfly and I can’t help but smile. I know what he’s about to do.

  “Hold still,” she screams at him as she launches into a flurry of blows.

  “Okay,” he says. Appearing behind her he touches her shoulders; static electric shock, ten times more powerful than a Tazer, discharges into her and flings her forward onto the ground where she rolls and convulses several times before coming to a rest, quite unconscious. I throw Fleet a thumbs up.

  “Carlos,” I say dodging another giant rock. “Now.”

  “On it,” comes his radio filtered reply.

  I glance around at the battlefield, taking everything in. Lux is busy reducing individual androids to slag. Fleet moves through them, taking away their weapons and keeping them from further damaging the ancient structures around us.

  “Epic, status?”

  His code is very complex. He is not aware that I am following his signal back. Since he is still using Artemis, he must not realize we are on to him.

  I smile. Nothing like turning things around on the bad guys to bring a smile to your face.

  Carlos makes his grand entrance, his spear slicing down through the sky to slam in front of Thrash. The big element controlling supervillain takes one look at the Protector landing in front of him and drops to his knees, interlacing his hands behind his head. “I surrender!” he yells.

  “Goodman,” Carlos says to him.

  “You have him, Epic?”

  Almost. His base is in the US... northern US. Montana. Near the Canadian border. Uh oh.

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  He is aware of my presence and is attempting to counter me.

  “Back off. I don’t want anything happening to you.”

  Affirmative... Amelia, he is powerful. More so than we thought. I...

  After he doesn’t say anything for a few seconds I get worried. “Epic?” A cold shiver runs through me. “Epic?” I land the suit in a crunch of dirt. Pythia is in the distance walking toward me. Carlos has the supers on their knees in surrender, and all the androids are turning to goo as they self-destruct.

  Still no response. My heart rate starts racing and I retract the helmet as I hyperventilate. “Epic!”

  No response.

  I pull up the ECM screen and look for the signal blocking Kate. Interesting. A part of my mind distantly takes note that he refined the interference to just the one frequency that blocks her, but not anything else. I use the power meter to determine the direction it is coming from; the remaining VTOL, a hundred feet away. While disabled it is partially intact. I can fix that.

  “Tank missile,” I say. The shoulder unit pops up and forms the long-barreled weapon that is capable of launching nearly a pound of titanium-tungsten carbide shaped like a missile.

  “Amelia?” Carlos asks.

  “Fire!”

  The air burns as the missile launches at three-thousand miles per hour and hits the parked plane like a meteorite. The fuel ignites in a fireball and the plane explodes into a million pieces.

  Everyone ducks or drops instinctively but me. I’m not worried about debris hitting me, even with my helmet down, the kinetic shields will stop that.

  “Kate, I need you right frigging now!” I put every raw emotion I’m feeling into that one statement.

  Two things happen at the same time: Kate appears in a pop of displaced air... and so does the Safety Force, teleporting in via their energy disks.

  “Amelia,” Pythia says suddenly. She’s breathing hard from running back from where Fleet deposited her to keep her safe. “No matter how you are feeling right now, you can’t fight them. It won’t end well for you...” she looks over at Carlos who’s got his foot on Thrash’s back to make sure he doesn’t try to go anywhere. “Or him.”

  I glare at her. Anger and other things burn in my heart and I really don’t care. I lost Luke—I’m not losing Epic. Not ever. I will burn this world to the ground before I let my friend go.

  “Pythia, get away from me.” I trigger the helmet and it flows up around me.”

  “Amelia Lockheart and Carlos Dominguez, you are under arrest by order of the EU Commissioner. You are in violation of our sovereign state. Any attempt to flee or resist will result in deadly force being used against you, and anyone aiding you,” Moon-Watch says as he floats above his team.

  My voice doesn’t sound robotized anymore; since everyone knows who I am, it’s not like I need to intimidate people. If the fact that I wiped out an entire solar system doesn’t convince them I mean what I say, my voice won’t. Still, as much as I want to punch first, I have to try talking to them. I push the anger that is enraging me down as much as I can.

  “You can’t know this, but you’re all being played by a power behind all of this,” I say pointing at the burning ships. “It’s an AI built by Ericsson, the megalomaniac who tried to take over the world a few years ago. You might remember I stopped him? Well, this AI has my friend and if I don’t leave right now to go get him, he could die. So please, I’m begging you, stand down and let me leave.”

  Moon-Watch is unaffected by my words, as is Irish Spring, but Union and Fille Magnifique look at each other for a moment.

  “Amelia,” Kate whispers. “Fille and Union are under a powerful persuasion. Something is almost forcing them to be here.”

  “But not the other two?”

  She shakes her head.

  Moon-Watch points at me as he raises up a few more feet. “You are a liar and a murderer. This is your last chance to su
rrender.” I don’t know if he was born a pompous ass, or if it just comes naturally to him.

  I need Kate to take me back to the US as fast as possible, but with Fille’s powers she may be able to intercept Kate’s port and take us wherever they want.

  “Okay, I’m done talking,” I say. I hold out my hands and a dozen different weapons systems pop out of the suit.

  “Time for you people to learn my name.”

  Thirty-TWO

  Particle beams, tungsten ball shotgun, AG pods, kinetic lances, IP Cannons, all fire at once. The power drain is immense, and the HUD visibly dims. This is my Alpha Strike. Since I can’t fire the tank missile and the AG pods at the same time, I don’t use that, or any of the other half dozen weapons systems I have access to. Mostly, I’m trying to distract them.

  Moon-Watch fires his beam in a wide arc in front of his team, burning up the physical attacks, but not the IP Cannons that strike him and Fille a moment later. He hits the ground with a crunch and Fille goes flying back to land on her butt before hitting her head on the ground.

  My kinetic lances strike Union and Irish Spring. Union slams backward, tumbling over in the dirt. Irish, though, just grunts. Once it passes, she runs at me, the ground shaking with each footfall.

  Unfortunately for her, Carlos is much faster. He shield checks her with enough force to send her flying into one of the burning ships.

  It sure is nice to face them in a suit that lets me actually fight. With the nano-suits, flying is about all I can do for longer than twenty minutes.

  Moon-Watch is the biggest threat. As an F5 energy generator, he can cut just about anything in half with his ‘moonbeam’ power. Stupid name for a power. I charge at him while he’s still regaining his feet.

  He fires a beam off at me; I dodge then blast him with another IP bolt. He hits the ground, spazzing out in a way that always makes me smile.