Sentinels

by Darius Brasher

  To find out everything I could about Mechano and the Sentinels, I figured I needed to go where they were. Namely here, in Astor City. That was how a farm boy who grew up intimidated by the size of a Walmart superstore found himself living in one of the biggest cities in the world, wrestling with how to confront one of the most prominent Heroes in the world.

  The Sentinels were the gold standard for Heroes, which made Mechano’s involvement in the attempts on my life even more disturbing and perplexing. When the average person heard the word “Hero,” they usually thought of the Sentinels. This was no hyperbole; surveys had been conducted that had amply demonstrated just how ingrained the Sentinels were in the public’s consciousness. For good reason. The Sentinels had saved the world more times than I could count. They had fought off alien invasions, defeated Rogues bent on world conquest, destroyed civilization-ending asteroids on a collision course with the Earth, and done a bunch of other things to pull the planet’s bacon out of the fire.

  I had grown up idolizing the Sentinels. Especially Avatar, one of the team’s founding members. He had helped found the team shortly after the passage of the Hero Act of 1945, the federal law mandating that all Metahumans register with the federal government, and that forbade us to use our powers unless we were first licensed. Avatar had formed the Sentinels along with Omega Man, Lady Justice, Millennium, and three other Heroes to deal with menaces that were too formidable for a single Hero to handle alone. Omega Man was considered the greatest Hero of all time. Though he had been killed in the V’Loth invasion, there was an urban legend that he would return to life if the Earth faced a potentially world-ending crisis again. Most people thought of Avatar as the second greatest Hero, right after Omega Man. Avatar had an unusually long life span and had been the Sentinels’ leader until he had been murdered a couple of months before my own powers had manifested.

  I didn’t like to think about Avatar’s murder. Like me, Avatar had been an Omega-level Metahuman and therefore one of the most powerful people in the world. Unlike me and my powers, which still were developing and growing, Avatar had been at the height of his powers when he had been killed. If it could happen to him, it certainly could happen to my scraggly ass. In fact, thanks to Mechano, it almost had happened to me. Several times. If I were a cat, I’d be on at least life six or seven by now between my encounters with Iceburn and what I had been through in the Trials. It was enough to make me want to lock myself in my room to conserve my remaining lives. I couldn’t bring to justice the guy who had hired Iceburn or find out what Mechano’s beef with me was while barricaded fearfully behind the door of my room, though. Besides, Coward Man was a less than heroic-sounding name.

  In addition to Mechano, the current members of the Sentinels were Seer, Doppelganger, Ninja, Millennium, and Tank. Avatar’s spot on the team had been vacant since his murder despite the precedent set by the team’s founders that there always be seven members. The Sentinels had said that Avatar’s empty spot would be filled once they found a Hero worthy of taking Avatar’s place.

  The public often called Mechano “The Mechanical Man” because he had an artificial body, but the consciousness of a man. That man’s name was Jeffrey Cole. Mechano was the only Sentinel the general public knew the real name of. Cole’s Metahuman power was the ability to download his consciousness into mechanical receptacles. Cole’s human body was long dead as he had been born in the late 1800s, but the essence of the man lived on in Mechano’s robotic body. I had seen a couple of black and white pictures of Cole before his human body had died. He had been a spare man with stringy black hair, a widow’s peak, deep-set intelligent eyes, and a moustache trimmed to near invisibility.

  Mechano’s current robot body was his fourth one. The first of Cole’s robot bodies had been mostly destroyed in a battle with the Rogue known as Vengeance long before I was born. The second and third bodies were decommissioned by Cole and put into storage after he built his current one. It was far more powerful than the others. Cole’s body du jour was almost seven feet tall, super strong, and had sensors that gave him superhuman senses of smell, touch, sight, and hearing. Also, he could project various forms of energy through the single rectangular red eye his body sported. I had seen television footage where Mechano’s energy blast had sheared off the top of a mountain and, on another occasion, reduced a skyscraper to a smoking pile of twisted metal and rubble. There were undoubtedly other things Mechano could do I didn’t know about as he was constantly tinkering with and enhancing his mechanical body.

  As indicated by the fact he could design and build such powerful robot bodies, Cole was a mechanical and electronics genius. It was not known whether that aptitude was a facet of his Metahuman powers. Regardless of whether his genius was Meta-based or not, Cole held more patents for various inventions than any other person in history. Heck, Mechano had even invented the material that composed the artificial teeth implanted in my jaw by the Guild after the Trials to replace the ones I’d lost in my battle with Isaac. The oral surgeon who put the implants in—an upper and lower incisor, plus a canine—had assured me of their quality after he had performed the procedure.

  “Though they look natural, they’re as hard as diamonds,” he had said, as if he wanted me to chomp down on a steel beam to test them, “and they’ll be free of cavities, decay, and discoloration long after your natural teeth have rotted out of your head. The material they are made of was invented by Mechano himself.” The doctor had said that last part proudly, as if he had been on hand to shout “Eureka!” when Mechano had come up with the stuff. I also wanted to shout when the doctor told me that, but I had wanted to shout an expletive instead of eureka. Thanks to knowing Mechano had tried to kill me, I had no interest in having anything related to him anywhere near me, much less implanted in my jaw. Unfortunately, the doctor did not tell me Mechano had invented the tooth material until the teeth had already been implanted and it was too late to remove them.

  After learning of Mechano’s connection to my teeth, I halfway expected that at some point my new teeth would explode in my mouth, or start dripping sulfuric acid, or drill through my skull and into my brain, or something else equally unpleasant. So far, however, they had done nothing more nefarious than biting my tongue so hard blood was drawn. In the teeth’s defense, that incident had been the fault of my overly enthusiastic devouring of a hamburger rather than theirs. My tongue had been in my mouth my entire life, and yet still I sometimes bit down on it. It made me wonder how often someone would inadvertently bite down on something they weren’t used to having in their mouth. Consequently, the thought of being fellated terrified me. Being a guy, my fears would likely not stop me should the situation arise, which it most definitely had not since my falling out with Neha.

  In addition to Mechano’s inventions like the material comprising my teeth, he had also commercialized many of his other inventions and made them available to the general public. Other technology he had not commercialized, and those pieces of tech he only made available to the Sentinels and the Heroes’ Guild. Almost all the futuristic tech the Sentinels used was designed by Mechano, not to mention much of the technology the administrative arm of the Guild relied on, including the Guild’s holosuites and matter transporters. Cole had even designed the secret space station only Heroes knew about which the Guild maintained in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth. Built by the Guild after the V’Loth invasion in the 1960s had caught Heroes and the rest of humanity by surprise, the space station was part alien invasion early warning system, part world guardhouse, part Guild office complex, and part Hero clubhouse.

  If you had told me before I learned I was a Metahuman that the Guild had a top-secret space station, I likely would have called you a liar, and then peed my pants with excitement if you gave me proof. It was a testament to all the crazy things I had seen and been through since developing my powers that I hadn’t been even slightly surprised when Pitbull told us new Heroes of the space station’s existence at our swearing-in ceremony.
These days, if you told me Santa Claus was real, a Hero, and used delivering toys during Christmas as a cover to check people’s houses for criminal activity, I wouldn’t bat an eye. I had seen too much.

  The royalties Mechano raked in for his various commercially available inventions were immense, making Mechano one of the richest men in the world. Much of that money was used to underwrite the Sentinels’ expenses. Being the world’s preeminent superhero team was not cheap. In addition to them maintaining a sprawling mansion on the outskirts of Astor City that was part headquarters, part residence, part fortress, and part tourist attraction, they used various forms of high-tech transportation to travel around the world to trouble spots. They also paid their members handsomely, something only a handful of other Hero teams in the country like the Heartland Heroes, the Gulf Coast Guardians, and the Sunshine State Warriors could afford to do. As a result, the Sentinels were full-time Heroes, unlike people like me who had to work a regular job to keep bread and butter on the table. Sometimes I couldn’t even afford the butter. I was an entry-level employee at a newspaper—hardly a thriving industry—after all.

  Famous superhero teams like the Sentinels and the Heartland Heroes were part of the reason why Isaac had moved to Astor City with me. He wanted to get enough crime-fighting experience to eventually apply to join one of the major Hero teams. Being on such a team would give him the biggest platform to help the most people possible, Isaac said. He wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father Herbert, a California state trooper killed in the line of duty when Isaac was fourteen. I suspected that was all true, but only part of the truth. It had been the goal of Isaac’s hated stepbrother Frank Hamilton, aka Elemental Man, to join one of those teams. Frank would never be able to do so as I had defeated him during the Trials. Though I was no family psychologist, I thought one of Isaac’s motivations for wanting to join an elite Hero team was to be able to rub Frank’s nose in it.

  The handful of elite Hero teams didn’t let just anyone join, of course. They only accepted cream of the crop Heroes with solid track records and tons of experience. Isaac figured moving to Astor City with me would get him the experience he needed. Our months in crime-ridden Astor City had convinced him he had made the right move. “Getting my license was like getting a college degree in being a Hero,” Isaac had once said. “Operating as a Hero in Astor City is giving me my PhD.”

  As a lifetime admirer of the Sentinels generally and Mechano specifically, the fact that a Hero at Mechano’s level had tried to kill me would have been almost flattering had it not been for the fact his attempts had nearly been successful. Someone repeatedly trying to murder you tended to knock fanboy adulation right out of you.

  The problem with me tattling to the Guild about Mechano as Isaac suggested was that I’d be telling on myself and Hacker as well. If I reported Mechano to the Guild’s investigative arm, it would ask me what evidence I had. The only evidence I had was buried deep inside of Overlord, and the only reason I knew it was there was because I had cheated during the Trials. The Guild would take a dim view of me cheating. Even though I had only cheated because I didn’t think the test was fair, there were three things I knew for certain: women liked bad boys more than nice guys (Hannah and Antonio were Exhibit A for the truth of this); Peter O’Toole was a double-phallic name; and, that the Guild could not care less about what I thought was fair. If I told the Guild I knew Mechano was out to get me because I had cheated on the Trials, the Guild would likely not only revoke my license, but those of Hacker and Isaac as well. If it had just been my license on the line, I would have risked it in the interest of getting to the bottom of what Mechano had against me. I would not risk the licenses of Hacker and Isaac, though. Not when they had worked so hard to get them. Plus, Isaac had nothing to do with me cheating. He still didn’t know about it as I hadn’t told him. I wasn’t planning to. Despite his constant jokes, Isaac was even more of a Boy Scout than I was as indicated by his threat to tell the Guild about our run-in with Antonio. If I told him I’d cheated during the Trials, there was the distinct possibility he’d report it to the Guild. I didn’t think he’d do it since it would get me into trouble, but I wasn’t willing to take a chance. Not with three people’s licenses on the line.

  So, reporting Mechano to the Guild was out of the question. Besides, as Dad had often said, “If you have a dog who needs to be put down, you don’t farm it out to someone who might botch it. You do it yourself.” The older I got, the more I realized Dad and his Jamesisms were on the money more often than not. If Mechano was the one responsible for Dad’s death, I wanted to be the one to find that out and take care of Mechano. I didn’t want to hand the responsibility over to the Guild’s investigators, despite how competent Ghost seemed and how terrifying he was.

  If I wasn’t going to go to the Guild, then what? Saunter up to the front door of Sentinels Mansion and ask to see Mechano to accuse him of several felonies? What would I say? I could see it now:

  Hiya, Mechano. I’m Kinetic. I’m a big fan. Or I used to be before I found out you tried to have me killed during the Trials. I know that because I did a teensy bit of cheating on my final test. Help a brother Hero out and don’t tell the Guild about that. I’d hate to have to give it up my Hero’s cape before I’ve even broken it in good. It took a month before I could get it to hang just right. Anyhoo, I’d thought I’d pop over and sock you in the metallic jaw for trying to murder me. But before I do that, I wanna ask if you also hired a Rogue assassin named Iceburn to try to kill me. He killed my Dad instead, so I’m still a little irked about the whole thing. While you’re at it, be a good scout and tell me whether the rest of the Sentinels were involved. If they were, even though they’re the world’s most powerful Heroes, I’ll have to kick their asses too. Why are you laughing? I didn’t know machines could laugh. Anyway, you pinky swear to tell me the truth about the Sentinels’ involvement? That’s a good robot. Uh, cyborg. Android? Well, whatever in the hell you are.

  I had studied enough military strategy to know, as plans of attack went, that one blew. So, I had spent much of my time since moving to Astor City trying to formulate a better one. Through exhaustive review of news archives available to me as a Times employee and from multiple visits to the public areas of Sentinels Mansion, I now knew more about the Sentinels generally and Mechano specifically than the president of their fan club did. Almost all my time not spent working or fighting crime was spent thinking, planning, and scheming, trying to come up with the best way to deal with Mechano and find out if he was behind my father’s death. Even my nighttime crimefighting I saw as preparation for confronting Mechano. Despite having studied hard in the Academy, I now knew that being a Hero wasn’t something you learned how to do from a book. It was something you learned in the skies and on the streets.

  Despite studying the Sentinels and preparing to confront them, I felt I had made zero progress. I was no closer to dealing with Mechano than I had been when I first moved to Astor City. I wasn’t sure what was holding me back. Fear? Intimidation? Indecision? Doubt? All the above? After all, Mechano was world-renowned, beloved, and rich. Whereas I was . . . not. Yes, I was just as much of a Hero as Mechano was. That was like saying someone who had just graduated law school was the equal of a Supreme Court Justice. The thought of me going up against Mechano was more than just a little daunting, like being at the base of Mount Everest and staring up at the heights you knew you had to climb. Plus, I was afraid my relative inexperience and less-than-cosmopolitan background would lead me into taking the wrong step against Mechano. After all, I was the guy who had been chomping at the bit to take Mitch and his minions out until Isaac had counseled me—correctly, I now realized—to proceed with caution.

  I was suffered from paralysis by analysis as I dithered these past few months over the best way to deal with Mechano. I needed to act. As Dad had often said, “If you think too long, you think wrong.” But knowing you needed to do something and knowing how to do that something were entirely different t
hings.

  “Hello! Earth to Theo.”

  Startled, I realized Isaac had been speaking while I had checked out, thinking about Mechano and the Sentinels.

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  “Lying is definitely not one of your superpowers,” Isaac said. “What I was saying was you’re trying to tell me you went postal on Antonio because of your frustrations over Mechano?”

  “Not just Mechano. I’m frustrated over the way this whole damned city operates. On that note, did you hear that Silverback is out of jail?”

  Isaac looked startled. “Already? We stopped him from robbing that armored car just last month. Wasn’t that his third strike? I figured he’d be cooling his heels the rest of his life in MetaHold.” MetaHold was the federal government’s primary prison for detaining criminal Metahumans. Iceburn was imprisoned there. It was on Ellis Island in New York where the Statue of Liberty had been before it had been destroyed in the 1980s by Black Plague. The government official who came up with the idea of imprisoning Metas in the same place millions had once streamed into this country seeking freedom must have had one heck of a sense of ironic humor. Give me your tired, your poor, your incarcerated superpowered masses yearning to break free.

  “They released him the day after we caught him,” I said. “Yesterday he successfully robbed two more armored cars. He got away clean as there weren’t Heroes around those times to stop him. I just heard about it today.”

  “You’ve got to give the guy credit for consistency, if not for good citizenship, by sticking with robbing armored cars. Maybe a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, but apparently it also does wonders for a Rogue’s bank account. So why did they let him out? It can’t be because of his winning smile.” Silverback was a bigger, scarier-looking version of the gorilla he had named himself after. Real silverback gorillas didn’t have razor-sharp fangs as long as your forearm and the strength to pick up a tank like it was a paperweight, but Silverback did.