Eighteen months ago all that would have freaked me the hell out, but I have to admit having a vagina is a lot better than getting raped up the ass in prison. That was my other alternative after I helped save the world. After the initial shock wore off it was a pretty easy choice.
Today is the big day, when almost a year’s worth of work finally pays off. And when it does, I can line up some real investors and not have to live off Holloway Corporation’s charity anymore. That will make the rest of the staff a lot happier because with as much red ink as it’s swimming in, Holloway Corporation is likely to turn off the money spigot at any moment.
“Hey gals,” I say as I enter the control room. “How’s it going?”
I have a half-dozen scientists working in my employ, plus another dozen assistants. They’re all girls, though about a year ago ninety percent of them—like me—had a penis. For one reason or another they haven’t changed back, though any of them could whenever they want, unlike me.
“It’s all good so far, boss,” Rhonda says in a voice as tiny as her body. It’s hard to believe she used to be a six-foot-three guy named Rod a year ago.
“Super. What about those nerds in Florida?”
“The link-up to NASA is done,” says Sue, one of those who hasn’t changed back because as a man she’d been hit with both ends of the ugly stick. She still doesn’t look like a supermodel, but at least now her face won’t send kids running in terror.
I find my chair in the control room. It’s kind of like the bridge of the Enterprise, with me in the center and all my minions around me to watch over the various monitors. I put on my headset to watch the data coming in. The girls were right that everything is all set for the launch. Only five minutes to go until we make history.
The idea for this didn’t hit me right away. I have Starla Marsh, aka Apex Girl, to thank for it. Her alien DNA gets superpowers thanks to Earth’s sun, which didn’t do her much good when she was abducted and dragged halfway across the galaxy. She asked Alan Bass, aka Velocity Man, if there were a way to fix this. Alan thought up a way, but he asked for my help to make it mobile.
We came up with a “solar suit,” basically a spacesuit that collects solar radiation and stores it for future use. While Alan and I were working on that, the idea hit me that we could apply this on a much larger scale. In the process we could eliminate energy shortages for the next five billion years or so until the sun explodes.
The problem with traditional solar energy is you have to have a sunny, almost cloudless day. In places like Seattle that’s almost impossible, so solar has been pretty much a niche market. How to get around that is actually thanks to the impostor Midnight Spectre and the alien weapon she used to make us all into women.
To do that, the impostor had maneuvered a bunch of Holloway Corporation satellites to redirect the weapon’s energy over the whole world. If that could work for the alien weapon, why not the sun? Except of course you still get the same problem of needing an open, cloudless location for your collectors. That’s why we have collection banks scattered all over the world. If one or two locations are cloudy or something, we still have plenty of spares.
At least that’s the plan. We’ve only done small-scale testing with airplanes redirecting sunlight in the desert. Today is when we try it for reals. After the dorks at NASA verify the results, I’ll have investors offering to blow me to be a part of it.
The counter runs down to ten seconds. A cute redheaded assistant I tried to ask out for six months does the countdown. As a woman I’ve never felt this excited without something inserted between my legs. “One…mark,” the redhead says.
There are no explosions or fireworks or anything like that. There’s nothing to see at all, just a model on my headset. “Everything’s green so far,” Rhonda says.
“Awesome,” I mumble as I watch it unfold in my headset. The solar energy is being focused by one satellite. Once it has built up enough charge, it redirects to the rest of the satellites in orbit. The headset draws little red lines to indicate the progress.
For this test we’ve set up two collectors, one in Arizona and the other in Australia. Both of those locations are clear and uninhabited should we have any problems. Not that anything is likely to explode, but for liability reasons we don’t want to take chances—damned lawyers.
Red lights start to flash in my headset the same moment I hear warnings going off at the other stations. “The collectors are down,” Sue says.
“Both of them?” Rhonda asks.
“Yeah. I don’t know what’s going on. They were fine a minute ago and now they’re both dead.”
“Cancel the test,” I say. I want to throw my headset down with frustration, but the virtual reality display in it costs about a hundred thousand bucks. I wait until the NASA link is severed before I shout, “Goddamn it!”
“It’s probably a short,” Rhonda says.
“Both of them? At the same time? Something stinks worse than Sue’s armpits.”
“Hey!”
“Sorry, hon.” I give her a pat on the shoulder before I make it to the door.
“Where are you going?” Rhonda asks.
“Out. You have the conn.”
I haven’t used the combat suit much since Omega decided to pay Earth a visit almost a year ago. I’ve spent most of my time in labs rather than fighting crime. Not always by choice; Melanie Amis suggested my work here would be a lot more beneficial in the long run than busting a few drug pushers. Sometimes I get the itch and take the old girl out to break a few heads; it’s not hard to find those heads in Detroit.
I’m running through the start-up checklist when Rhonda finds me. “Tonya, you can’t go now. We have to find out what’s wrong—”
“That’s what I’m doing.”
“How? By beating up a couple of purse snatchers?”
“Do you think I’m that stupid?” I lift the facemask of the helmet so I can stare Rhonda down. Sometimes the girls have a tendency to think I’m an actual seventeen-year-old they need to look after rather than someone who was born almost forty years ago.
“Sorry, boss.”
“It’s fine. But you better take a few steps back.”
“Good luck,” she says as she backs out of the room. Then I light up the engines and go.
***
I stop in Arizona first since it’s closer. The collectors are a pile of smoking junk. I don’t need to be a reformed assassin like Diane to know someone blew them up. Probably C4. The question is how they did it without us noticing via the cameras we have watching the place.
I doubt I’ll find anything around here, so I head for Australia next. My luck probably won’t be any different there, not if the saboteur is smart. She—or he—has probably already disappeared. We aren’t likely to find any fingerprints or that other CSI stuff either. She—or he—might as well be a ghost.
I’m about a mile out of our site in the Outback when a warning tone sounds. “Electromagnetic pulse detected,” the computer tells me.
Out in the middle of nowhere that can only mean someone who hasn’t done her homework very well is trying to shoot me down. Shielding the suit from EMPs was one of the first things I did after my initial run-in with Velocity Man. That was the Mark 1 suit, so obviously it’s gotten a lot better since then. What kind of moron is down there?
Still, sometimes it can be good to play along. I cut the engines and put the rest on stand-by to make it seem like they got me with their EMP. My nice, easy flight turns into the elevator ride from Hell as I plunge towards the ground at speeds that will make me a puddle of goo.
As the collectors come into view, I can see they’ve been sabotaged like the others. This time there’s someone in dark red standing near them, waiting for me. Whoever it is has made a big mistake.
When I’m about five hundred feet overhead I turn the engines back on and reactivate the rest of the systems. I wobble in midair, losing a couple hundred feet in the process, but eventually I get enough control to co
me down gently right in front of a man dressed in a bad imitation of my Mark 1 suit.
“Your back-up systems might have saved you, but now you will face the full power of Magneeto!”
He raises a rifle similar to mine and cuts loose with another EMP. Again it has no impact on my systems, but the shockwave is enough to put me on my back. “Ow,” I mumble. As I reach for my ion rifle, I say, “Sounds like we’ll be adding copyright infringement on top of assault and destruction of private property.”
“I have no fear of your puny injustice system!”
He’s about to fire another EMP blast, but this time I have my ion rifle up and ready. I hit him in the left knee with a blast. His shot goes into the air, where I hope it doesn’t find an airliner or anything else. Then I use a kung-fu kick I learned from Diane to knock the gun from his hands.
“All right, dipshit, it’s all over,” I tell him and hope he has sense enough to cooperate. Though for as much damage as he has done to my pet project, I’d kind of like for him to make a move so I have an excuse to shoot him dead.
“You can’t stop Magnee—”
I pop him in the mouth before he can finish. In my best Velma from Scooby-Doo voice I say, “Now let’s see who you really are!”
I gasp just like those kids of the Mystery Machine always did. And for good reason: I recognize the guy under the mask. It’s not Old Man Jacobs or any of that shit.
It’s Brendan.
“Jesus Christ. What the hell are you doing here?”
“I didn’t want to miss your big day, sis.”
I take off the helmet and shake out my hair; it’s pretty sweaty and limp after flying through two deserts. “I should have known you’d be the only one dumb enough to try using an EMP on me.”
“You’ll never stop me—”
I pop him in the mouth again, this time even harder. Blood drips down his chin and he’s probably missing a couple teeth now. “You jealous little shit. Do you know what you’ve done? This system could give the world unlimited clean energy and you’ve wrecked it because of some grudge from thirty years ago.”
“This is your fault! Mommy said you were supposed to look after me and you never did! You were always too busy with your projects and your girlfriends.”
“Christ, Brendan, you’re thirty-five years old. You don’t need anyone babysitting you anymore.” I make sure his gun is far away before I sit on the ruins of my solar collectors—my dream. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Like you’d care.”
“Of course I care. I’m your…sister.”
“My little sister.”
“Yeah, real hilarious. How’d you get changed back?”
“I jumped some girl in an alley. Used her ID.”
I shake my head. There are supposed to be safeguards to prevent that, but with thousands of people lined up every day like it’s a Black Friday sale, the gatekeepers aren’t always that observant. “And then you decided to get even with me? By wrecking my project?”
“Serves you right.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit! We’re grown-ups now—” He interrupts me with a smug snicker. My body isn’t that of a grown-up, though my ID says I’m nineteen. “Shut up! You’re an adult now and that means you have to take responsibility for your own actions. You can’t keep blaming me for your problems.”
“Mommy said—”
“That was thirty fucking years ago! Grow up already.”
“Are you going to arrest me now? Maybe I can get your old cell at Gitmo.”
“You’d like that, but I’m not arresting you. I’m taking you back to Dixon so they can put you in a rubber room, where you belong.”
“You can’t do that! I’ll never go back there. Ne—” When I hit him this time he goes down for the count. I stand over his armor-clad body and shake my head.
***
After I drop Brendan off at Dixon Psychiatric Institute in Indianapolis, I head over to Atomic City. Rather than waiting for the elevator or clomping up forty stories, I land on the balcony. The door is already unlocked.
“Hi honey, I’m home,” I announce.
I look around but don’t see anyone. From the kitchen she shouts, “Just a tick, love. I’m almost done here.”
In a way I’m glad she’s in the kitchen as it gives me time to take off the armor. I leave the pieces in a pile by the balcony door and then go into the bathroom to freshen up. After all that flying around I look a wreck; I do what I can to touch up my make-up and hair. I’ll need to stop by the salon soon for a fresh coat of dye.
Dinner is waiting in the dining room: two heaping plates of spaghetti and meatballs. For a former world-class assassin, Diane is a hell of a cook. She’s not so much into fashion; she’s dressed in her standard black sweatsuit with her hair pulled back tight in a ponytail. At least she consents to let me kiss her.
“I wasn’t sure you were going to make it,” she says. “I heard some wanker sabotaged your test.”
“Yeah, some wanker.”
I sit down at the table, suddenly exhausted. I manage the strength to shovel in a couple bites of spaghetti. Diane studies me with those hard killer’s eyes. I always get a little nervous when she does that, like she’s looking at me through an invisible rifle sight. “I’m sure they’ll let you have another go.”
“I’m sure. After I lay out hundreds of thousands more for another batch of collectors.”
“If you want money—”
“I can handle it,” I snap a little harsher than I mean to. I know where Diane’s money comes from and it’s not something I want connected to a legitimate scientific venture.
“I was going to say I’m sure Mel can wrangle some up for you.”
“I don’t want it to become a military project.”
“If you insist, love. So who was the wanker behind it?”
“No one you’d know.”
“An amateur then?”
“You could say that.”
Later, when I’m full of pasta and cuddling with her on the couch, Diane asks, “What is it you’re not telling me?”
I want to tell her to mind her own damned business, but then I remember Diane knows a hundred ways to kill me with her thumb. “The wanker was my brother.”
“I didn’t know you had a brother.”
“It’s not something I’m proud of.” While I had built myself an awesome suit of combat armor and begun a life of supervillainy, Brendan had bounced from one mental hospital to another. Between stints he’d live on the streets, until someone would catch him with a butterfly net and begin the cycle of futility again.
Diane listens to me while stroking my hair like I’m a corgi in her lap. When I finish, she says, “Sounds like that boy was a few cards short of a full deck.”
“Yeah, I know. You think I did the wrong thing taking him back to the hospital? They aren’t going to have any better luck this time than any other time.”
“And you think prison would be better for him?”
“Not so much him as the rest of the world.”
“Especially you, yeah?”
“Yeah. Is it terrible of me to think that?”
“Of course not, love. Sounds like he’s run you through the wringer already.”
“I wish there were something I could do for him. Machines are so much easier to fix.”
“Tell me about it.”
“You aren’t going to mention any of this to the general, are you?”
“My lips are sealed.”
“I hope not,” I say before I kiss her. Sometimes it’s still weird to kiss a woman as a woman, but I can get past it. It’s especially easy with Diane. Since all the crap we went through a year ago, we’re like best buddies. It was only natural we’d eventually take things to another level.
Later, after Diane has gone to sleep, I stare at the ceiling. It’s going to be tough to rebuild what Brendan ruined, but I can do it. Fixing machines is a lot easier than fixing people after all.
Gener
al Gaia #1:
Labor Pains
The worst part of every day is the commute from Redoubt City to Atomic City. It’s not because of traffic or crowds since I have my own helicopter. It’s because every trip there and back I have to spend listening to Mom.
“I don’t understand why they keep fighting. It’s such a terrible place,” Mom says. She’s reading the file on the renewal of hostilities in the Balkans. “What are they fighting over?”
“It’s ancient grievances,” I say.
“And what do they expect us to do about it?”
“They want us to talk to the leaders and see if we can work something out.”
“They want you to go over there? Can’t we bring them here?”
“I wish.”
“You should tell that secretary-general you’re not going to such an awful place.”
“Mom, please—”
“Oh, I know. You don’t have to listen to me. I’m just your secretary.”
“You volunteered!”
“Well it was either that or sit around playing bridge with Jasmine all day.”
“I’m sure you just hated that.”
“I did. That woman cheats like no one’s business.”
“Are we only talking about cards?”
Mom gives me that old glare from my childhood. It’s still effective despite that we’re almost the same age now thanks to the alien weapon. “That is not any of your business, young lady.”
“You’re dating my girlfriend’s butler, who used to be almost a father to her, so I think it is some of my business.”
“We’re not dating. We just spend time together.”
“A lot of time.”
“Are you jealous?”
“What? No!”
“If you and Robin are having problems—”
“We’re not. Everything’s fine.”
“You don’t sound very sure. Is something wrong with you two?”
“God, Mom, stop it. I don’t want to have this conversation with you.”
“I’m only trying to help.”
“I know.”
Girl Power Omnibus (Gender Swap Superhero Fiction) Page 81
