by James Maxey
“Use your ape-fu,” Prodigy said with a smirk. Plainly, she really had read Valentine’s book if she knew about ape-fu. It made me wish I’d read it myself.
Prodigy pressed her hand against the hull. The sensor on my neck itched like hell as a high pitch hum filled the room. I felt pressure build in my ears, like they were getting ready to pop. “Get ready for a dimensional crossing,” said Prodigy, as her robotic arm started to glow. “Five. Four. Three. Two. One!”
Outside the window, the tower seemed to jump slightly to the left.
“We made it,” said Arc. “Now the shadow tower is real to me, and the first one we approached looks like the reflection.”
“Suit up,” said Golden Victory. “We don’t know what the atmosphere is like inside the tower.”
“Probably safe,” said Prodigy. “Sterngeist needs to breathe it, after all.”
“Assuming he’s inside,” I said. “I mean, we really don’t know.”
“Most of the tower is solid,” said Arc, his hand against the window as he studied the structure. “But I do see some voids down there, near those things that look like windows.” I tried to see what he was looking at, but it must have been too far away. “And I’m getting moving heat signatures in that area. Plainly, something’s alive there.”
“Finding Sterngeist isn’t really our top priority. Figuring out how to disable this tower is the first mission,” said Golden Victory, strapping a small clear mask over his face and moving toward the hatch.
“Once I’m inside, I should be able to figure out how this tower is operated,” said Prodigy.
“Never doubted it for a second,” said Golden Victory. “I’ll fly ahead and clear a landing area for the ship. Once we’re in, the rest of you protect Prodigy while she studies this thing up close.”
He flew into the airlock. There was a clang and a whoosh, then Golden Victory flashed past the windshield, zooming toward the tower. Arc guided the ship after him while Anyman opened a compartment in the floor and pulled out several small suitcases. He tossed a couple to me and my clone. “These suits will adjust to any pressure or atmosphere we encounter. The helmet will let us stay in contact even if we encounter vacuum.”
“Just so I’m completely up to speed, the plan is to break into the tower and punch aliens while Prodigy figures out how to disable this thing?” My clone asked the question, but it was on my mind as well.
“You’ll be shocked at how many complex problems in life can be solved by punching the right jaw,” said Arc.
“No wonder Harry loves being on this team,” I said to my double.
As I pulled on my suit, there were bright flashes outside the window. I gazed out at massive explosions unfolding in eerie silence. Apparently, the tower’s defenses included missiles. Golden Victory was zipping from missile to missile and smashing through them long before they ever got near us.
The tower kept getting bigger and bigger, filling our whole view. The explosions faded away. Either the bad guys had run out of stuff to throw at us, or we were too close now to target without risking damaging their own structure.
Golden Victory rose in front of us, flying straight ahead, so that I had an excellent view of the bottom of his boots. The soles of his boots were bright yellow, like the rest of his costume, and I stupidly wondered how he kept them so clean, before remembering, duh, he flies. His boots probably never really touch the ground.
Then Golden Victory peeled off at impossible speed, becoming a speck. That speck slammed into the tower, and suddenly there was a huge, gaping hole in the structure. Arc confidently steered around giant house-sized shrapnel flying right at us until we were inside the tower. Golden Victory was waiting for us, arms folded across his chest, in the center of a large open room. We touched down beside him.
“That went surprisingly easy,” said Prodigy.
Then the stone shark tiger aliens mobbed into the room and things got a little crazy.
Chapter Twelve
Fray
Echo’s Story
These tiger aliens were terrifying, much bigger in life than they’d been on television, and there were, like, a million of them. That’s probably an overestimate, but they were flooding in from every direction and with their big shark teeth and muscular arms and skin literally hard as rocks, I thought we had maybe thirty seconds before they would tear the ship to shreds.
Golden Victory plowed through their front ranks, sending them flying.
“There’s too many for him to fight without some slipping past to destroy the ship,” said Arc, opening the airlock. “Let’s get out there and zap them, but remember, we’re Legionnaires! Try not to kill anyone!”
“Is he serious?” I asked.
“The very first article of the Legion charter says we protect the innocent,” said Prodigy. “I take it you didn’t read it?”
“How are these things innocent?” I asked, though my words were almost drowned out as thunder shook the ship. Arc had jumped into the crowd of aliens, throwing lightning. I raised my hand to shield my eyes from the flashes.
“For now, assume they’re merely soldiers, not the masterminds,” said Prodigy. “See that tall thing over there? That big, red crystal? It looks like Calcadonian tech. Clear me a path so I can rig up a connection with it.”
“Can do,” said Anyman, though he didn’t sound as confident as Arc and Golden Victory.
My clone and I followed him into the airlock. He gave me a grin, but sounded nervous as he said, “My first day on the team I had to fight the Spelunker’s cavemen, which is only slightly more challenging than beating up a little league team. I was a card-carrying superhero almost six months before I faced off with an alien. You’re really jumping in with both feet.”
“Four feet, technically,” said my clone.
Anyman chuckled, then swung open the hatch just as a fresh round of thunder and lightning left me halfway deaf and blind. But as I jumped down from the saucer, I saw that Arc’s swaggering confidence wasn’t mere bluster. Easily half the aliens were already on the floor, limbs twitching like they’d been hit with tasers.
“Here goes nothing!” Anyman shouted, disappearing as he went into his alternative time bubble. Half a second later I spotted him across the room where he was clutching his hand, his face twisted in pain. Apparently, he’d been dumb enough to punch one directly, and the pain had cost him his concentration, popping him out of his time bubble.
“Watch out!” I yelled, but it was too late. One of the aliens Golden Victory had sent flying crashed right into Anyman and he vanished beneath its huge bulk as it landed.
Prodigy leapt down and said, “Get busy with that ape-fu! We need to get to the crystal!”
I nodded and started running in that direction. Fortunately, only a few stragglers were on their feet between us and the crystal following Arc and Golden Victory’s handiwork. The noise of their fighting kept getting louder and louder and I realized suddenly that we weren’t fighting in a vacuum. The hole we’d flown in through had already been sealed by a swarm of tiny repair robots.
My suit helpfully announced, “Pressure stabilizing at 15psi. Atmosphere 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% trace gasses.”
“These things must breathe nitrogen,” I called to Prodigy.
“That’s the same composition as earth’s atmosphere,” said Prodigy, rolling her eyes. She took up a karate pose as one of the shark dudes dodged past Arc’s latest blast and charged toward us, snarling and shouting in whatever language it was they spoke. I don’t know what it actually said, but I was fairly certain it wasn’t, “Greetings, we come in peace.”
I decided to follow Harry’s first rule of ape-fu and go on offense. My clone had exactly the same idea as we ran toward the alien. The thing was ten feet tall and had to weigh a ton. But, since its head looked a little bit like a shark, maybe it had a sensitive nose. We both grabbed baseball-bat-sized shards of metal left over from where Golden Victory had punched his way in. We jumped in unison, swinging our clu
bs in mirror image attacks, and completely missed as the beast crouched, putting its hands over his head. It barked out a series of harsh, guttural yips. As if we’d choreographed it, my clone and I bounded back as we hit the floor then leapt up again, landing kicks on each side of the thing’s head. In unison, we hopped away, cursing, wondering exactly how many toes we’d broken.
The thing remained in its crouch, trembling, the guttural barks trailing off into something that sounded like sobs.
Prodigy knelt before the alien and put her hand on its shoulder. She snarled and growled, her voice producing as much bass as her slender body could muster.
“Growl, growl, snarl,” said the rock shark tiger, wiping its nose.
“Snarl growl bark,” answered Prodigy.
“You speak this thing’s language?” my clone asked.
“Some of it,” said Prodigy.
“When the hell did you learn it?” I asked.
“Just now. They’ve been shouting back and forth ever since we got here,” she said. “I’ve heard 147 distinct grammatical phrases during their verbal exchanges. Patterns emerge.”
“Growl growl?” asked the rock shark tiger.
“Snarl, yip,” said Prodigy.
The beast stood slowly, towering over us, no longer looking quite as terrified. “Snarl yip snarl growl,” it said.
“They didn’t come here to attack,” said Prodigy, translating. “They thought our ship had crash landed. They were hurrying in to check to see if there were survivors they could rescue.”
“Oh come on,” said my clone. “These things stole our moon. They didn’t come in peace.”
“It’s obvious she’s telling the truth,” said Prodigy. “Didn’t you notice they aren’t armed? They’re a species with spacefaring technology. You think they haven’t invented rifles?” She raised an eyebrow. “What if… I mean… wait a second.”
She bark-snarled a few more questions at the beast. The alien bark-snarled back. They went back and forth for a couple of minutes. Meanwhile, looking around the room, Arc had shocked all the remaining aliens into unconsciousness and Golden Victory was busy tying them all up by wrapping steel bars ripped out of the walls around their ankles and wrists.
“That should hold them,” said Golden Victory, wiping his hands against each other as if to clap off dust. Golden Victory landed next to Anyman. He checked his pulse. “Breathing’s shallow but I’m not hearing any evidence of blood in his lungs. His heartbeat’s steady. I think he’ll be okay.”
“I thought they had us for a minute there,” said Arc, bent over, his hands on his knees, breathing hard. “Just how many of these things were there?”
“376,” said Prodigy. My own guess had been way off. “And if you hadn’t been so eager to attack, you might have noticed that they didn’t come here to fight. The fact that they adjusted the atmosphere for our comfort is evidence they really did come here to rescue us.”
Golden Victory tensed up as he saw the alien standing before us. Arc stood erect, lightning crackling around his fists.
“Don’t even think about hurting her,” said Prodigy, stepping between them and the alien.
“This thing’s a lady?” asked Arc, sounding confused.
“Not precisely. Our gender classifications don’t really apply to these beings,” said Prodigy. “But by using a female pronoun, I’m subconsciously engaging your empathy for this creature.”
“Ask her how many more there are,” said Golden Victory. “When can we expect their next attack?”
“They didn’t attack this time,” said Prodigy. “You threw the first punches. You probably noticed they were terrible at defending themselves.”
“Yeah,” said Arc, scratching the back of his head. “I mean, I was right in the thick of them and none of them even landed a punch. I have lightning reflexes, but I don’t have eyes in the back of my head. I thought I was surviving this fight by pure dumb luck.”
“If you tell that lightning reflex joke one more time, I’ll punch you,” said Prodigy.
“That seems harsh,” I said.
“I didn’t even get that it was a joke,” said my clone.
“It’s your first day on the team,” said Prodigy. “It takes about a month before you’ll hear every electric-themed pun he can work into his conversation.”
“Let’s not fight among ourselves,” said Golden Victory. “What do you mean, they weren’t attacking?”
“I mean they’re a race that has progressed far enough along the evolutionary chain to master space travel. The higher the technological competency of a species, the less likely individual members of the species will be violent. Once you build powerful enough weapons, no one really needs to know how to fight hand to hand any more. The world’s greatest martial artists are on more or less equal footing with anyone wielding a handgun.”
“So they fight with guns instead of fists,” said Arc.
“For a while,” said Prodigy. “But then they’ll develop weapons even more deadly. So deadly, in fact, that eventually the species will be forced to abandon violence if it hopes to survive. Humans are already well along this path. We in the Legion are atypical in that we frequently engage in conflict. Most average Americans live their whole lives without once being involved in a fistfight, let alone a gunfight. Once advanced technology emerges, peaceful cooperation becomes a much more effective evolutionary strategy for passing on your genes than violent aggression.”
“So why does this thing have such big teeth and claws?” my clone asked.
“No doubt they came up along an evolutionary path that once rewarded such traits. Humans still have relatively powerful legs compared to other apes, relics of a time when we hunted on foot, even though now we acquire our calories by driving to stores and restaurants in vehicles.”
“Fine,” said Arc. “Maybe these things aren’t soldiers, but I don’t see how that changes the current situation. We’re still standing in a tower they helped build for the sole purpose of stealing our moon and driving humanity into extinction.”
“Their real purpose was to grab this Glorgon the Conqueror guy,” I said. “Maybe, you know, as a back-up plan someone should be working on finding him?”
“Negotiating with hostage takers will cause more problems in the long term,” said Golden Victory. “We don’t need a backup plan. We need to disable this tower.”
By now, Prodigy had moved to the tall red crystal and placed her robotic hand against it. She said, “I’ll eventually be able to figure out how to turn this thing off, but the key word there is eventually. I can already tell that these systems are programmed using mathematical concepts I’ve never encountered. This might take a few hours.”
Arc stared at the floor. “Or, we can try the direct approach.” He knelt, placing his hand on the floor. “The rest of you probably can’t feel it, but something several miles beneath us is generating powerful magnetic fields. I can trace them all back to a single power source down near the base. I’ve never seen anything like it. Unless my eyes are playing tricks, I think they’ve got a magnetically contained black hole spinning down there, and they’re drawing energy from the drag on space around it. The whole thing’s no bigger than a golf ball, but it’s putting out about 100 terawatts of power every second.”
“That’s a lot?” my clone asked.
“The US power grid produces about 10 terawatts hours per day,” said Prodigy.
“Changing the vibrational frequency of something the mass of the moon would require incalculable amounts of power,” said Golden Victory.
“Nothing’s incalculable,” said Prodigy. “Give me a few minutes and I can probably come up with a pretty close number.”
“My point is, no power source, no moon theft,” said Golden Victory. “Give me thirty seconds. Arc, you’re coming along to guide me. You three get Anyman back onto the ship. Get him bandaged up. We’ll be back in a minute,”
“It’s over five hundred miles down,” said Arc.
“Okay
, we’ll be back in five minutes. I don’t want to move so fast you burn up from friction.”
“Appreciate it,” said Arc, as Golden Victory put his arm around his waist, then kicked a hole in the floor and flew down. Almost instantly, little robots swarmed over the hole and started filling it in with their bodies. They fused together seamlessly, so that you couldn’t even tell there had been a hole there thirty seconds ago.
“I guess I can do the math on the power requirements needed to shift the moon for my own amusement later,” said Prodigy, sounding a little disappointed. “Let’s get Anyman onto the ship.”
“What about the big guy?” I asked, nodding toward our alien captive.
Prodigy barked and snarled. The alien answered in kind, then walked toward the corner of the room and sat down facing the wall.
“She’s agree to sit quietly and not interfere. She doesn’t want you to kick her again.”
“We hurt her?” my clone asked, sounding pleased, though she was limping just as much as I was as we moved to Anyman’s side. “Awesome.”
“Yeah, we beat up a pacifist. We should be so proud,” I said.
“Shouldn’t the two of you be of the same opinion?” asked Prodigy.
“Do you always agree with yourself?” I asked. “You never have second thoughts or conflicted feelings?”
“Not really,” she said. “But I recognize that I operate on a level of mental clarity you’ll never be able to comprehend.”
“Does she remind you of anyone?” my clone asked.
“Brain Boy,” I said.
Prodigy froze in her steps, her face growing blank.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“You’re so close to the truth,” she said. There was something weird about her voice. It didn’t really sound like her voice, and her lips weren’t moving. “I wanted to tell you the second we met, but the moment didn’t seem right.”
“Tell me what?” I asked.
“Isn’t it obvious?” said Prodigy, her face still immobile. As strange as her ventriloquist act was, I was even more dumbfounded when she said, “I’m Brain Boy!”
