by James Maxey
“I made a few calls.”
“And you were going to get around to telling me this when?”
“When you needed to know.”
“Wow again,” she said. “I quit.”
“You were just worried about being fired.”
“Now I’m even more worried about having I job I didn’t get on my merits.”
Retaliator nodded. “I understand if you feel that way. But I also understand you’ve been fighting crime as the new Blue Bee for five years now, ever since you gained your superpowers. You just went toe to toe with the Fourth Horseman without flinching. Brains, heart, and fearlessness are rare commodities. Hiring you was an easy decision.”
Blue Bee sighed. “Fine. I unquit.”
“Excuse me, Retaliator, sorry to change the subject,” I interjected, giving Mica back her phone. I still really wanted to call Jenny, or at least text her. “Since your phone is working, can I borrow it? Smash Lass doesn’t have any signal.”
“Most phone networks are still stressed by satellite deviations,” said Retaliator. “After the first time Sterngeist attacked by steering an asteroid into near earth orbit, I ordered the communication companies I own to make sure our satellites could compensate for gravitational anomalies.”
“That doesn’t really answer his question about using your phone,” said Blue Bee.
“I’m afraid not,” he said. “It’s full of sensitive information. It explodes if anyone but me holds it.”
Retaliator’s eyes look a little like he smiled when he said this. First he was laughing at jokes, now maybe he was telling them? Or perhaps he wasn’t telling a joke. Maybe he was pleased at the thought of his phone exploding in the hands of an unsuspecting victim.
“Whatever,” I said. “Let’s go find the Prime Mover and get this over with. Any idea where to look?”
“I’ve triangulated the radio commands that summoned the Fourth Horseman from hiding,” said Retaliator. “We’re heading to Dallas.”
Ten minutes later we’d taken a tachyon tube to Dallas and were zooming across the skyline in a black, unmarked helicopter with no running lights. Retaliator was at the controls and I was out on the landing skids, hanging on for dear life. We weren’t that high above the tips of the skyscrapers. Even though it was the middle of the night the air was like a furnace as the concrete, steel and asphalt beneath us gave up the heat of the day. The moon looked bright and crisp from this height, absolutely normal, with no evidence of the scare it had given us earlier. There was a noticeable lack of explosions, and as far as I could tell it hadn’t been cracked in half by a stray punch from Golden Victory. Maybe things were going alright with Echo’s team.
But, man. Echo. What the hell had she gotten herself into? It was dangerous enough, infiltrating the Legion to figure out who had killed the original her. Now she was going off to fight aliens on the moon on her first day on the team? And, Jesus, she’d kissed me. After Valentine died, my real feelings for her had been all I could think about. When she was gone, I saw clearly just how much I loved her and wanted her in my life. But, Jenny… I love Jenny too. We’ve had rough patches, more than a few, but, look, she’s put in the work. It can’t be easy having me as a boyfriend, but after every fight or misunderstanding we’ve ever had, she’s always willing to work it out. Part of me wants to be with Val. Part of me wants to be with Jenny. Asking to be with both of them would result in me being blown up and set on fire. My options here seemed—
“Big Ape!” Retaliator screamed at me.
“What?” I yelled back.
“Pay attention! I said jump!”
Maybe he had. I don’t know. In addition to being distracted by my love life, there was still the fact I hadn’t slept in a real bed or ate a cooked meal since my little jungle survival adventure. My brain wasn’t in peak condition. The chopper was swinging back around toward the roof of a bland tower of mirrored glass. Blue Bee was already buzzing toward it, hanging beneath the collapsible motorized hang glider she used to zip around cities. The Bee Wing, I think she calls it.
“Jump!” Retaliator yelled again. So I jumped, aiming for the roof.
In retrospect, I probably should have asked questions, or at least been paying attention to the orders he gave us as we were flying here. I got the big picture; Blue Bee and I would create a distraction so that Retaliator and Smash Lass could get inside without being noticed. Past that, if there were details, I’d missed them. Hopefully Blue Bee had taken notes.
Despite Blue Bee’s head start, I hit the roof first, since plummeting is a lot faster than gliding. I rolled as I landed, bouncing to my feet, looking around for something or someone to hit, since that’s the normal flow of these things. When nothing came at me, I decided that the next step of our plan was probably to get inside the building. There was a rooftop door next to a tall radio tower. I sprinted toward it and found it locked. Blue Bee would probably be able to pick the lock, or maybe she had some cryogenic spray to shatter it, or acid to eat away the hinges. But our mission was distraction, not stealth. I threw my full weight at the door. It was metal, so it didn’t give, but it did dent and bulge out around the frame. I got my fingers into the gap and ripped the door away, then turned toward the Blue Bee as she dropped from her glider. She gave me a thumbs up.
“That should get their attention,” she said, hopping over the mangled door. She stopped, taking a long sniff. “Not a lot of bees nearby. I saw the park along the river and hoped I might catch a break.”
“Are you smelling them out?” I asked. I took a sniff myself. I caught a scent of chlorine and wondered if there was a swimming pool nearby.
She nodded. “My senses are enhanced by the radioactive pollen. I control bees with pheromones and ultrasound and why are you grinning?”
“Something about the phrase ‘radioactive pollen’ makes me feel extra-superheroic. I doubt that there are many people in the world with my level of job satisfaction.”
“Good for you for liking your work. You plainly don’t fight crime in the middle of cities while relying on honeybees to do some of your fighting.” She sighed. “I keep hoping that one day I’ll have a mission that requires me to fight a bad guy in a field of sunflowers, but so far, no luck.” By now, a tiny swarm of eight or nine bees were buzzing around her. “I guess this is it. I’ll have to make them count.” She entered the door. “Let’s do this.”
“You know where we’re going?”
“Retaliator said we’d find him in the penthouse,” she said, leaping to a landing at the bottom of the steps. The stairs continued down, but there was a door off the landing.
“Right,” I said.
“You weren’t paying attention at all, were you?” She pulled a small canister off her belt and sprayed the lock. It instantly iced over.
“Sorry. I’m okay when I’m moving thanks to adrenaline, but the second things slow down my brain fogs over. I need sleep like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Just follow my lead,” she said, giving the lock a tap. It shattered. An alarm started clanging.
“We definitely have their attention,” I said.
“Just start hitting things,” she said with a smile, kicking the door open.
“Job satisfaction!” I yelled, charging through the door.
The thing about the Prime Mover is you never have a clue what you’re going to face when you go after him. Sometimes he’s surrounded by killer demon robots like the Fourth Horseman, other times his henchmen are just dudes in suits with machine guns. The door we’d come through led into what looked like a private gym, complete with swimming pool. As I came around the pool five guys in dark suits burst through a door on the far side of the room. They all had machine guns and stopped just inside the door to take aim. At the same time, I was passing a huge stack of free weights. I grabbed a fifty pound weight and held it before me like a shield. Bullets pinged off it as I charged. Three of the guys focused on me, while two were aiming at Blue Bee, who was somersaulting across the room,
dodging bullets like a champ.
Suddenly, the gunmen aiming at Blue Bee dropped their rifles and grabbed their ears, screaming. If you’ve only got a few bees to work with, guiding them to sting the bad guys inside their ears is a pretty good way to use them.
I reached the goons who were still shooting at me. I pounded them with the free weight. Two of them dropped instantly, but the last guy sprang backward and assumed a karate stance. From out of nowhere, a pair of nunchucks popped into his hands.
“Seriously dude?” I asked. “A machine gun didn’t work and you think a couple of sticks are going to hurt me?”
He answered me by moving with blinding speed straight at me. I lifted my arms to block, but it turned out he was really good with those sticks, and one came down straight across my forehead. If my skull had been of ordinary human thickness, he’d probably have cracked it open. As it was, stars exploded in front of my eyes and I stumbled backward, right into the fucking pool.
I popped back to the surface, my vision clearing. I noticed the surveillance cameras and had a sinking suspicion that my little tumble into the pool was fated to wind up on YouTube in one of those “Superhero Fail” videos. On the plus side, I’d been saying all night how much I needed a bath.
All the henchmen were down except the nunchuck master. Blue Bee went at him, and, man, they both had some moves. The dude kicked like Bruce Lee and was built like a MMA champ, twice the size of Blue Bee, but she has the proportional strength and speed of a bee so WHAM! She caught him with an uppercut that left him flat on his back, dead to the world.
“Job satisfaction,” she said, rubbing her knuckles.
I climbed out of the pool feeling a lot more alert than I had before my plunge. There was a stack of towels on a shelf nearby and I grabbed all of them. After I dried my face, I poked my head into the hallway. At the far end I could hear a television. It sounded like it was tuned to a news channel. There was someone on TV explaining in a strangely calm tone all the horrible things that would happen if the moon disappeared forever.
We crept down the hall. I left behind a trail of sopping towels. Our efforts at stealth were probably offset by the fact that, when I’m wet, I stink to high heavens. Whoever was in the penthouse could definitely smell me coming. We reached the living room where the TV was on and peeked inside.
Retaliator was in the middle of the room, crouching over a middle-aged man pushed to his belly, his arms locked behind him in handcuffs. Smash Lass was next to him, with a pile of unconscious henchmen behind her.
The handcuffed man smiled gently as he looked at me and the Blue Bee. Retaliator stood, looking a little disappointed. I got the impression he’d gotten the Prime Mover locked up without having to throw any punches.
“There’s really no call for such aggression,” said the Prime Mover, sounding almost amused. “You believe I’m involved with the theft of the moon, but I’m not. In fact, I’ll tell you how to save it.”
Chapter Eleven
Shadow Tower
Echo’s Story
The tower was the biggest structure I’d ever seen. I felt small looking at it, and not just in a physical sense. I’ve lived a pretty fucked up life. I mean, I got my superpowers in the first Sterngeist invasion, I’ve been kidnapped by the government, got into a weird bondage relationship with a sadistic vigilante, dated a bona fide rock star, learned that my father, who I saw shot before my eyes, is still alive and apparently a supervillain, I’ve stolen a lottery ticket from a time traveler, I’m currently trying to solve the mystery of my own murder, and, oh right, I’m in love with a giant man ape. You’d think after all this nothing could surprise me. But looking at this tower staggered me on an existential level. From inside the bubble of my own life, I feel like I’m something, like I’m leaving at least a few tiny footprints on the sands of reality. I even, every now and then, feel like my life matters. This tower crushed that illusion. It was built on a scale I couldn’t comprehend by beings with minds so obviously advance compared to mine I might as well have been a monkey staring at a skyscraper. What the hell was I doing here? What could I possibly do about something like this?
Prodigy chuckled as she looked out the window. “I know a lot of supervillains act like they need to compensate for undersized genitals, but this really ups the bar.”
“There’s no need for blue humor, young lady,” said Arc.
“How the hell did they build something like this without anyone noticing?” I asked.
“That’s an excellent question,” said Golden Victory. “After the first Sterngeist invasion, we placed remote warning satellites in strategic orbits as far out as the Kupier Belt. They would be triggered instantly if he’d used his Lawbreaker drive. If they weren’t using a faster than light drive, I don’t see how they could have guided this tower here without it being spotted by a telescope.”
“Maybe they built the tower on site?” I said.
Anyman shook his head. “NASA currently has satellites making detailed gravitational maps looking for voids that might indicate caverns where a moon base could be located. That’s the data I used to find the gravitational anomalies. But the anomalies don’t pop up until a few days ago. There’s no way they could have built this in just a couple of days.”
“You lack imagination,” said Prodigy. “I can propose at least five methods for assembling a structure this size in far less than two days.”
“Question,” said Arc. “Why do you all keep using the singular noun?”
“Which singular noun?” asked Prodigy.
“Tower. Am I the only one who sees two?”
“Two?” asked Anyman. “Maybe there’s something wrong with your eyes.”
“Something different about my eyes, at least,” said Arc. “I see energy fields.”
“Like radio waves? Heat?” I asked.
“Like everything,” said Arc. “Even matter is composed of energy. I don’t even remember what my wife’s face looked like. Ever since I got my powers, I see the quantum fields that make up the molecules of her skin, and everything beneath her skin, and everything on the other side. I can see all the way through the planet if I concentrate. It’s one reason I wear these goggles. I designed them to help me focus.”
“And you see a second tower?” asked Golden Victory.
“Yeah?” said Arc, not sounding confident. “I mean, it’s almost a reflection of the first one, like there’s a mirror behind it, only, ordinarily, I see right through mirrors.”
Prodigy snapped the fingers of her robot hand, a loud CLACK that made me jump. “This was going to be my first suggestion! The aliens built this tower in an alternate reality and are projecting it through into our own. This tower serves as giant tuning fork. Turn it on, and the moon resonates at a different vibrational frequency, shoving it into another universe. Doppelganger, make a double of yourself.”
“Why?”
“Because your power works by pulling duplicates of yourself from other timelines.”
“How did you know that?” I hadn’t told her how my powers worked.
“Because you wrote an autobiography?” she said, sounding disgusted she had to explain it to me. “Even if it was heavily fictionalized.”
“Right,” I said.
“So, get chopping,” said Prodigy, pulling a tool box out of a compartment overhead. “Another timeline is nothing but another world in the multiverse. I’ll rig up a dimensional resonator using your double that should synch the vibrations of this ship with hers so we can reach the other dimension. Destroying the tower here won’t be enough. We need to take it out in the other dimension first.”
“A sound plan,” said Golden Victory.
I apparently was unable to tell the difference between a sound plan and babble.
“How long will it take you to build a dimensional resonator?” asked Arc.
“I’ll be done in about another twenty seconds,” said Prodigy, holding up her robotic fist. “I can reprogram the tech in my arm on the fly. The sec
ond I got the idea I started rewiring circuits.” She opened the tool box. “This will hold the sensors in place.” She pulled out a roll of duct tape and closed the lid of the tool box.
“What sensors?” I asked. “You guys are moving too fast for me.”
“These sensors,” said Prodigy, opening the palm of her robot hand. A small door popped open revealing the finished devices. They looked like two little nickel watch batteries. “Let’s move! Chop chop, Doppelganger!”
I couldn’t think of a reason not to do what she was asking me to do, even if I was still confused as hell about how this was all supposed to work.
Luckily, when I’d joined the Legion, they’d found a more high tech method of triggering my power than chopping off my arm with an axe. Instead, I wore bracelets that sat high on my forearms, halfway to my elbows. They were actually laser guillotines, and would sever my arm instantly and, I’d been assured, painlessly. I closed my eyes and pressed the button. There was no pain, but there was a smell like a grease fire that left me feeling a little ill. I opened my eyes and found my double staring back at me, waving wisps of smoke away from her face.
“That bracelet’s going to need to some fine tuning,” said my clone.
Prodigy didn’t ask permission as she peeled off a strip of duct tape and used it to secure one of the little watch battery things to the back of my double’s neck. “This is going to hurt like hell when I peel it off, isn’t it?” she asked.
“You won’t be peeling it off,” I reminded her, as Prodigy came toward me with the duct tape. “I’ll probably explode you once we get near some aliens.”
“Don’t,” said Prodigy. “We’ll need her to keep the dimensional resonance in tune. If she explodes, we’ll pop back into our own dimension without finishing the mission.”
“Then I’m not going to have a lot to do, am I?” I asked.
