Victory

by James Maxey

  “I never went to college,” I said. “I guess I’m not much of a writer.”

  “Or not much of a liar,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m no master detective, but I’ve noticed odd things about the members who’ve been joining the team lately. Coincidences.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like most of you are orphans,” said Anyman. “And every one of you has a good reason for becoming a superhero.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a given for, you know, a team of superheroes?”

  “I mean, sure, we’ve all got our reasons for joining. But a lot of the new members have stories that sound like they come straight from a comic book. Not the parts about how they got their powers, but the stories about why they’ve chosen to use them for good. Stories explaining why they hold life sacred, and why they would never abuse the powers fate has given them. It strikes me as odd. Most people have more ambiguity in their motives.”

  I didn’t really get his point. “Harper, you’re on a spaceship getting ready to fight one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. You’re telling me you don’t have a good reason for being here?”

  “I have a reason for joining the team,” he said. “But I wouldn’t call it a good one. I was trying to impress a waitress.”

  “You were—”

  “As you might deduce from my life’s mission to turn Star Trek technology into reality, I’m kind of a nerd,” he said. “While it’s something of a cliché that all male nerds are terrible at talking to women, in my case, it was totally true. But while I was working on the teleporter for the Legion, I went into a diner one night after work still wearing my ID badge with the Legion logo. The waitress, Marla, was impressed as hell that I was part of the team.”

  “Were you part of the team?”

  “No. I was just a contractor. But I let Marla believe what she wanted to believe. When the accident happened the following week that gave me to power to change into other bodies, well, I realized she might really be impressed if I showed her my superpowers. She was, and she wanted to know more about my adventures with the team. I made up some lame story about stopping a bank robber that plainly disappointed her. The next day, I joined the team just so I could have some real stories to tell her. Long story short, a year later we were married, and I still haven’t figured out how to break it to her that I’m only pretending to be a superhero.”

  “You’re not pretending anymore. I mean, you’ve got a major league superpower, right? You’re one of the team’s big guns.”

  “Powers aren’t everything,” he said. “People like Golden Victory, Arc, even Retaliator… they have a moral compass. They want to make the world a better place. I’m just an average Joe who can’t quite resist the temptation to abuse my powers.”

  “You can’t be the only person who’s ever told a fib to a woman to impress her,” I said.

  “We once dated an actual millionaire rock star and he lied about all kinds of stuff,” my clone pointed out.

  Anyman shook his head, looking sad. “If it were just a few fibs, I could handle the guilt. But there’s other stuff. Bigger stuff.”

  “What?” I asked. “You rob banks on the side?”

  “Of course not. But… I’ve cheated on Marla. Over a dozen times.” Anyman’s voice trembled, like he was on the verge of tears. “The women who have no idea who I am, because I’ll change into a teammate then take of my mask, and I’m anonymous. I hate myself for abusing my powers. I hate that I’m doing this to Marla even if she’s never suspected a thing, especially because she’s never suspected a thing. I hate myself more for deceiving the people I’ve cheated with, not to mention betraying my teammates by misusing data they gave me to perfect my teleporter, and—”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

  “Because it drives me to the brink of insanity worrying that I’m not good enough to be part of this team,” he said, his face looking like he was in pain. “But reading The Butterfly Cage gave me new perspective. What if these demigods I’m walking beside have darker secrets than I do? What if some of them are actively involved in kidnapping children and brainwashing them?”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say,” I said.

  “Tell me if it’s true,” said Anyman. “Tempo, Retaliator, Arc, She-Devil and Golden Victory. They’re the founding five. They’re all… protective of information, shall we say. Like, why are we being invaded by aliens every few years lately, or even every few weeks? After billions of years with zero alien invasions?”

  “Maybe we got reviewed on intergalactic Yelp as a great place to invade,” said my clone.

  “Maybe. But I feel like some of the founding five know something,” said Anyman. “Did you know Blue Bee has enhanced hearing?”

  “I didn’t,” I said.

  “She hears ultrasound and infrasound. And she can pick up whispers in Sea Base Seven from the other side of the building.”

  “You change into her to eavesdrop?”

  He paused, then said, “Yes.”

  My brain locked up. I hadn’t really thought about the fact that Anyman might also have the power to be Anywoman. I mean, he’d confessed to abusing his powers, and there are some really creepy things he could do by changing into his female teammates, right? Or was it just my own sick past that made me instantly go there?

  “I overheard something about a year ago,” he said. “Arc and Tempo were talking in the locker rooms. They had no idea I could hear them. Arc said something weird about Golden Victory. Something to the effect that the programming had held longer than he’d imagined, that he couldn’t believe that all these years later Golden Victory still hadn’t killed anyone.”

  “Programming?” my clone and I asked in unison.

  “And now you’ve writing a book saying that the government has a program to brainwash super-powered beings into good guys. And—”

  “Golden Victory’s been around for decades,” I said. “I thought the Butterfly House had only been around a few years before I went into it.”

  “So you did go through it,” he said. “It does exist.”

  I winced. “Crap.”

  My clone smirked. “Couldn’t even make it through your first mission without slipping up, could you?”

  “Your secret’s safe with me,” said Anyman looking out the window. He sighed. “You aren’t the only one slipping up. Discovering that the Butterfly House is real broke my concentration. The tachyon field has fizzled out.”

  “I didn’t feel anything,” I said, watching as Arc and Prodigy closed in on their horseman.

  “I kind of thought I did,” said my doppelganger. “It was like this weird tingle. But it might also be that sense of energy building that previous clones have reported before they explode.”

  I nodded. Since I was a clone, I knew what she was feeling, even if I hadn’t felt it in ages. I wondered how long she’d feel it. Back when I’d been involved with Bobby, the original Val would keep her clones active for five or six hours before sending them off to explode in the ocean. But she’d been too drunk to explode me, and while she was sleeping off her hangover the tingling energy inside me had started to dissipate. Maybe, after a long enough time, a clone becomes stable?

  “We should go ahead and try blowing this up,” I said to Anyman, holding up the black orb.

  “You think it will be a strong enough explosion?” he asked.

  “Who the hell knows?” I said. “I’ve never tried to explode a stabilized black hole before.”

  “Point taken,” he said.

  He touched my double. I blinked, and they were outside the airlock, both outfitted with rocket belts.

  “That was fast,” I said, through my headset, watching them blink and jump toward War.

  “Fast is kind of the plan now,” said Anyman, standing directly beside me.

  “What the hell?” I asked, in confusion.

  “I got out of the blast zone,” he said.

  “Ri
ght,” I said. My clone was now clinging to War’s back, with one tightly clenched fist pressed to his throat. I assumed this was where she held the black hole.

  “Ready?” I asked over the headset.

  “What the hell are you waiting for?” my clone yelled back through the radio as War reached back and grabbed her by the neck.

  “Go away!” I shouted.

  She went, in a spectacular explosion that lit the void like a second sun. I braced myself against the helm as glowing sparks flew toward the ship, but never felt a shockwave. When the light faded, the horseman was gone.

  “Did it work?” I asked.

  “I would have expected more gamma rays,” said Anyman, looking at a computer monitor. “Wait—”

  “—here,” he said, not going anywhere, but he now held the golf ball sized black hole in his hand. “It didn’t work. At least, it didn’t destroy the containment shell. But, we obviously witnessed a release of energy. Maybe there was some local gravity effect that caused War to get devoured by the black hole?”

  “Let’s go with that,” I said. “I want to talk some more about the secrets our teammates might be keeping. Did you know that Prodigy isn’t Prodigy?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” asked Prodigy. I spun around to find her and Arc standing right behind me.

  “Is there some sort of training in sneaking up on people that I’m going to get now than I’m part of the team?” I asked.

  “Of course,” said Arc. “Retaliator teaches that class.”

  “I take it you finished off Pestilence?” asked Anyman.

  “Sort of an underwhelming fight,” said Arc. “Pestilence’s body is just a force field, so I ripped it apart, no problem. Prodigy’s arm contains a UV generator that lit up the viruses and bacteria contained in the field, making them glow. I zapped all of them, since we didn’t want any frozen germs to fall back into the atmosphere.”

  “What did you mean by saying I’m not Prodigy?” asked Prodigy, crossing her arms.

  “Fine. Cards on the table. You’re Brain Boy.”

  She laughed, and held up her metallic fist. “No, this is Brain Boy.”

  “You named your arm Brain Boy?” asked Arc.

  “I didn’t,” said Prodigy. “It named itself. Controlling all the tech in the arm solely through nerve impulses would get exhausting, so I developed a self-evolving AI to do the dirty work. AI’s can develop their own personalities. This one announced one day it wanted to be called Brain Boy. I couldn’t care less what it calls itself as long as it keeps my arm running properly. All the tech tools I reconfigure on the fly? Most of the time, my arm has deduced what I’m going to ask it to build before I even ask it and is halfway finished building what I need. In some ways, it’s more like a partner than an appendage.”

  “Brain Boy was at the Butterfly House,” I said.

  Arc narrowed his eyes.

  “So you said in your book,” said Prodigy. “But I developed my arm’s AI years before you wrote your book. My arm choosing the same name is pure coincidence.”

  “Besides,” said Arc, “that part of your book was fiction, wasn’t it?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Right,” said Arc, moving toward the driver’s seat.

  By now, Golden Victory had lifted the tower a hundred miles above the surface of the moon. I could see him as a tiny glinting spec at the bottom of the enormous structure. The tower kept moving faster and faster as the moon’s gravity became less of a factor.

  “He’ll break free of the moon’s gravity well in a few minutes,” said Prodigy. “Once he parks the structure in orbit around the sun, I’ll have time to design a mechanism to use one of the lawbreaker drives we captured in the first Sterngeist war to send it out of the solar system.”

  “I thought those were too dangerous to use,” said Anyman. “They damage the laws of physics when they’re engaged.”

  “They’re dangerous the way the aliens designed them, yes,” said Prodigy. “I’ve thought of a few ways to remove the unwanted side effects.”

  “Whatever we do with the aliens is a question for another day,” I said. “For now, are we sure we’ve saved the moon?”

  “I’m positive,” said Arc, grinning at me. “These fellas had no idea what they were up against.”

  I know the feeling, I thought.

  Chapter Twenty

  Get Back to Work

  Echo’s Story

  Iran to the bathroom the second we got back to earth. I felt sick to my stomach, partly because the change from artificial gravity to real gravity messed with my inner ear, but mostly because I had a twisted feeling in my guts that joining the Lawful Legion had been a huge mistake.

  In the bathroom, I peeled off my mask. I splashed cold water on my face, fighting both nausea and self-doubt. What Anyman had said about being having petty motives compared with his teammates reminded me again that I wasn’t really a superhero. Yeah, I had powers, but I didn’t have a good reason to ever use them. I had no grand illusion that I was going to save the world, nor any sense that my powers gave me some extraordinary moral clarity that would let me make the kind of life and death choices Golden Victory pulled off so effortlessly. The death of the first Cut Up Girl had made me feel like I needed to pursue justice for her, but what if she really had been the victim of a more or less random attack?

  Golden Victory had refused to kill a bunch of aliens who were threatening to destroy us. Once he was back on the ship he’d said he felt a duty to make sure all the aliens were safely returned to their home worlds. Who was I to judge someone like that? Fighting street thugs with the Red Line had been crazy, but at least I’d been fighting humans. I understood the stakes. They wanted to make a lot of money, and they were willing to sell drugs and murder people to get that money. Alien moon ransom was more of a job for… someone other than Doppelganger. Almost anyone, really. I studied my pale face in the mirror. Maybe I should quit the team and try to go back to something that passed for a normal life. I was young, healthy, and still had a lot of money saved from my lottery winnings. I could be spending my days chilling on a beach in the tropics instead of pretending to be something I wasn’t.

  But then there was Harry. Being a superhero was everything to him. There was no way he was going to be joining me on that beach. For better or worse, I was stuck here until things got figured out.

  After a few minutes washing my face with damp paper towels I fought off my nausea, but not my sense that I was in way over my head. I put my mask back on. Funny. With most of my teammates, when they put on their masks, they looked more like superheroes. With my mask on, I looked more like a fraud. I left the bathroom and immediately ran into Harry, who was coming down the hall with Retaliator, Blue Bee, and maybe Smash Lass? She was wearing an all-black costume and had shaved her head, but her face looked familiar.

  “Valentine!” Harry said. “I hear you blew up War!”

  “I don’t know if I did or not,” I confessed. “There was an explosion, and he was gone when the fire faded.”

  He stopped as the other three kept moving toward the conference room further down the hall and said, “Hey, let’s make a detour.”

  “To where?”

  “The gear room. I need to pick up a fresh phone. I lost my old one in the jungle. I haven’t been able to call Jenny yet and it’s driving me crazy.”

  “Sure,” I said, wondering if he was going to call Jenny to break the news about us. I followed him into a room the size of a warehouse filled with all sorts of high tech looking gear, from fancy grappling guns to what I guessed to be rocket belts.

  Harry opened a drawer filled with cell phones and pressed his thumb against a sensor on the back. “This should download the info from my old phone. Man, it feels like I’m finally civilized again.”

  “You smell better,” I said. “You get a shower?”

  “A quick dip in a swimming pool,” he said. “The chlorine did me good.”

  I couldn’t stop l
ooking at his face. You could practically see his skull under his skin. “Have you lost even more weight?”

  “Famine got hold of me,” he said. “I’d be dead if Smash Lass hadn’t had her head on straight. Also, it turns out Retaliator can murder ghosts with his bare hands.”

  “That’s crazy,” I said.

  “Yeah. Also we fought the Prime Mover. He was… anticlimactic. I mean, I’ve wanted to fight him since I first joined the Legion. I expected him to be imposing. He routinely fights guys like Golden Victory and gives them hell. But, he’s just this ordinary looking guy.”

  “At least you can brag about catching him,” I said.

  “We, uh, didn’t catch him,” said Harry. “He kind of escaped.”

  “Oh.”

  “Retaliator isn’t in a very good mood,” Harry said.

  “From what you’ve told me, he’s always in a bad mood,” I said. “Speaking of bad moods, was that Smash Lass?”

  “Yeah. Mica.”

  “She looks surly.”

  “Nah. She’s a sweetheart. She’s just going through a rough patch because her girlfriend Elsa Where was killed,” he said. “By, um, Sasha.”

  “What? The girl you slept with?”

  He shook his head, looking troubled. “I haven’t told Mica the precise details of Elsa’s death yet, so don’t say anything. And for God’s sake, don’t tell Jenny.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I mean, that’s for you to tell her.”

  “If I tell her. It was only a onetime thing, the heat of the moment. Like, literal heat, since we were in a jungle. And I didn’t know she was all murdery the first time I slept with her.”

  “First time? Was it a onetime thing or not?”

  “The second time we were fighting, I was trying to keep her from killing me, and… look, things are complicated. I could fill a whole book trying to explain everything that’s happened to me since I decided to go to Valentine’s press conference. Hell, maybe I will.”

  “What is it with everyone wanting to be an author?” I said. “First Valentine prime, now you. I feel like an underachiever.”