Action Figures - Issue Five: Team-Ups

by Michael C Bailey

  Its glowing aura fades as it touches down on the beach with a grace that belies its bulk — and this thing is huge. Even hunched over like it is, it’s easily twice my height and four times my width (I swear it has muscles you don’t find in a human body). Its leathery yellow skin is marred by swollen scars. Tattered yellow and blue cloth hangs around its waist like an improvised loincloth. If a wild boar and a crocodile mated and then crossbred with King Kong, their kid would have this thing’s face. Eyes as large and black and glossy as eight balls pass over the crowd.

  “Carrie,” Sara whispers. “Did you see...?”

  “I saw,” I say, my chest suddenly tight. There’s no mistaking that glow.

  It has my powers.

  Concorde lands, maintaining his distance from Fugly Alien Guy. I detect the soft hum of his weapons systems on standby. Fugly doesn’t notice him — or does and isn’t sweating him.

  The creature locks eyes with me. Its mouth bends into a wicked arch lined with daggers, and it points at me, its hand flaring to life with a blinding white light.

  “Se. D’erorn Vakrd.”

  “Lightstorm!” Concorde cries out in warning an instant before Fugly throws a blast his way. Concorde hurtles the length of the beach, skipping across the sand like a stone across a pond. That confirms it: Fugly does not come in peace.

  “Carrie, go!” Sara says.

  Reading my mind, gal-pal.

  My takeoff bowls over everyone standing next to me, and the sonic boom I generate almost immediately after that takes down everyone else. Sorry, folks, but I think that might be better than the alternative if I’d stayed put. Granted, Fugly might not have been getting ready to fry me to a cinder, but I don’t want to test that hypothesis with so many potential collateral casualties nearby.

  Hypothesis confirmed. A beam of energy slices past me, close enough I can feel its heat. It’s like getting shot at by Manticore if Manticore’s suit was powered by a full-sized nuclear power plant.

  On the plus side, if he’s out to kill me, I don’t feel obligated to hold back. I throw a return blast, expecting him to dodge. I’ve been working diligently to perfect a technique employing quick bursts of hyper-speed to bring me around to an opponent’s exposed flank. I’ve successfully tagged Concorde on several occasions with that trick, much to his admiration-slash-annoyance. The move works beautifully.

  ...Unless the target in question doesn’t even attempt to dodge. My blast hits his aura and scatters harmlessly. By the time I realize this, I’m already on an attack vector to the point in space I expected him to be rather than where he is. My follow-up misses him completely.

  I soar past him. He turns on a dime without losing speed and gives chase. Something that big should not be that agile.

  He closes in. I burst again to put some distance between us — then he bursts, and in the blink of an eye, he is literally on top of me. He grabs for me. I dive. He dives. I corkscrew around and level off. He follows. I can’t shake him. He’s practically glued to me.

  “Lightstorm!” Concorde shouts in my ear. He sounds cranky. He’s fine. Breathe sigh of relief here. “Report!”

  “Can’t talk!” I respond. “Dogfighting!”

  New tactic. I burst again, but this time I throw up a cloaking field, vanishing, then veer off course and slow down. Fugly keeps going, straight and true, and starts to pass me. He looks around, scanning the sky for me.

  And he finds me. He can see me. I shriek, startled, as a bolt of energy nearly punches a hole in my chest.

  “Lightstorm, we have a problem!” Concorde says.

  “So do I! I don’t know if I can take this guy!”

  “Bring him down in Milne’s Woods,” Matt says, “near the Bowling Ball. Give us five minutes.”

  Five minutes? Easier said than done, but I’m running low on options.

  Evasive maneuvers time, then. I plot a course for Milne’s Woods in on my headset, but I take a scenic route, weaving and bobbing and diving and climbing erratically, unpredictably, throwing in random bursts of speed. If I can prevent him from drawing a bead on me...

  Unfortunately, he doesn’t need to be precise. With a sweep of his hand he sends a wave of light across the sky at me — an energy tsunami. I climb above it, but a second wave, thrown at me at an angle, nails me. For a second that feels like an eternity, my body screams in white-hot agony. My aura didn’t do a thing to protect me.

  Shake it off. Shake it off and keep it together or this thing is going to kill you.

  I power dive. Fugly stays with me. He’s hot stuff in the open sky, but let’s see how he does on the ground.

  I break through the treetops of Milne’s Woods and hug the ground as I slalom through the trees. Fugly keeps pace and handles my impromptu obstacle course admirably, but his blasts can’t connect. Sorry, environment. Nothing personal, but I have a homicidal alien to stall.

  Except he’s not playing the game by my rules. A tree explodes to my right, spraying me with splinters. The force of the blast rattles me. A wave of energy passes overhead, sheering dozens of trees in half — including those ahead of me, and suddenly I’m dodging a punishing rain of branches and flaming logs. A chunk of wood catches me in the face, knocking my headset off and taking me to the ground. I auger in hard, ripping a shallow trench in the dirt. I taste blood.

  Fugly lands at my feet and looms over me. I blink furiously, trying to clear my vision. I lift an arm, hoping to get off a lucky shot, and a hand big enough to engulf my head seizes me by the forearm and jerks me off the ground. My shoulder erupts with electric heat. He grabs my other arm and squeezes. My hand goes numb almost instantly. He snorts in my face, his hot breath reeking like rotting meat.

  “Ihbi’idruc. S’kla urlgen, dh u’mi svimu kafn. Dhr wede idic leb laen,” he says, and he nods at me, as if in approval. “Shan sesh’nih ducdes nedelge. Wesiv des’ta srehn, avoz srehn mi’sol, wo’wisd dasi m’Galt shlaht belet.”

  A familiar sense of terror grips me as thumbnails like meat hooks press into my palms, and I feel that first trickle of warm blood ooze down my wrists. The pain and the fear purge the disorientation, replacing it with a fury so pure it causes my body to blaze with blinding, searing light.

  Not again. Never again.

  I scream, a war cry accompanying a devastating bomb blast, and I’m ground zero. The shockwave ripples out, flattening every tree within fifty feet of me and driving the alien to his hands and knees. He releases me and I fall at his feet. We lie there for untold minutes, neither of us in any condition to capitalize on the moment.

  Come on, Carrie, get up. Get up and finish this.

  The alien beats me to it. He doesn’t look too steady, but he’s up, and I’m not. Focus, dammit. One shot. That’s all you need. You can take him down with one shot.

  A beam of white light nails the thing square in the chest. He cries out, making a sound like a kicked dog. He staggers, falls, and this time he doesn’t get back up.

  I didn’t do anything.

  Six more aliens float down from the sky. More specifically, they float down from a ship hovering silently overhead. It’s shaped like an arrowhead and gleams like polished silver. It’s a fraction of the size of the dreadnought, but it’s still plenty big. The aliens are dressed in identical yellow uniforms with white and blue details — identical except for differences in form to accommodate some decidedly non-humanoid body types — and they’re all glowing, just like Fugly.

  And like I do when I power up.

  They land, surrounding me, and power down. A slender humanoid with delicate features and long dark hair — she somehow strikes me as female — gestures and says what sounds like “Asurr Galt” to the others. One of the aliens pulls a small gun-like device out of a belt pouch and presses it to the base of Fugly’s skull. It makes a short, sharp hissing sound. A sedative, I hope. I don’t want Fugly back on his feet anytime soon.

  The leader strides up to me. She gives me a look and holds up her three-fingered hands, then brings th
em together as if in prayer. A gesture of peace? Or alien sign language warning me to brace myself because she’s about to eat my eyeballs? Considering how insane this day has been, it could go either way.

  “Nus evos ouos auunal,” she says. Another alien, a leathery thing built like a gorilla and sporting a second set of T-rex arms in the center of its chest, issues a series of grunts. The female alien responds with a quick, curt gesture. Gorilla Rex bows as if chastised and returns to the task of picking Fugly’s unconscious carcass off the ground. He grunts to one of his comrades, a squishy looking thing with limbs lacking in any visible joints. Squishy gives Gorilla Rex a hand hoisting up Fugly.

  “Okay, you’re not trying to kill me,” I say, “so that’s a good thing, right?”

  The female alien gives me a once-over, like she’s never seen the likes of a being like me. Yeah, well, back at you, lady. She points at my hands, which drip blood on my uniform. I hold one out. She kneels and gently takes it in her own. Her skin is cool to the touch.

  “Qi eta vus nuvos detce,” she says. “Coet avus pa’l astrarma?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand you...which is an idiotic thing to say, because you probably can’t understand me, either, huh?”

  She holds up two fingers. Is she telling me to wait?

  She is. She reaches into a pouch on her belt and produces two small gelatinous globs. She holds them up to her ears (at least, I assume they’re her ears).

  “You want to put those in my ears?” I say, not really expecting a response, but she nods. Is nodding a universal gesture for “yes”?

  “Remember what Dr. Quentin said,” I mutter to myself. “Start with our human preconceptions and work from there as new evidence presents itself.”

  The alien smiles and nods again. I dare say the evidence supports the hypothesis that nodding is an affirmative gesture. She reaches out to stick the globs in my ears, but she doesn’t quite make it thanks to the bluish-black streak that slams into her like a runaway train. Missy and the alien tumble to the ground, but only Missy gets back up, and she’s good to go for round two.

  Matt and Stuart charge in next. Matt peels off a series of rapid blasts from the gun he developed with Edison. At such close range, the impact is more than enough to take two more of the aliens, including Gorilla Rex, off their feet (or whatever). Stuart grabs Squishy, who lets out a startled hoot, and pitches him away. Squishy yelps comically as he literally bounces off a series of pine trees like a pinball made of Jell-o.

  The element of surprise gave the Squad a momentary advantage, but it passes quickly. The two aliens left standing power up. Tripod, who’s little more than a fleshy cylinder with three stumpy legs, emits a pulse of some kind that throws Matt and Stuart back. Matt barrel rolls to blunt the impact and nearly takes out Sara, who’s been staying at the edge of the playing field. She crouches to check on him, which means she’s taking her eyes off her opponents — namely Tripod, who’s charging up for a finishing blow. I power up, planning to throw myself in front of the blast, but I know I’m too late. Sara and Matt are going to be incinerated right before my eyes.

  “SARA!”

  She looks up in time to see a solid beam of energy lancing toward her. She throws her arms up, an instinctive defensive gesture that isn’t going to do a damned thing against an assault like that — except it totally does. Energy sprays off a dome of invisible force, leaving Matt and Sara unharmed, if more than a little confused. She looks over at me, and I hear her voice in my head asking What the hell just happened?

  What happened is that Sara broke through the blocks Mindforce put in place to prevent her from accessing her powers.

  Psyche is back, baby.

  Sara jumps to her feet and throws her hand out like a softball pitcher launching strike three. Tripod bends in half and collapses. His comrade, a willowy thing with pale green skin, retaliates, machine-gunning energy bolts at her. Sara tosses up a shield and draws his fire while Matt circles around to his flank. He fires. A concussion blast goes high and turns Willow into a Bobblehead.

  Stuart charges at Gorilla Rex as he and Squishy leap back into the fray, while their leader struggles to get up. Missy pounces, claws bared and ready to tear the alien apart.

  This is getting out of control, and it wasn’t all that in control to begin with. Someone is going to get killed.

  “Stop!” I shout, but no one hears me. I’m going to have to do something drastic. I try to recall how I felt when I pulled that trick to take down Fugly, that sense of pure terror transforming into primal anger transforming into raw power.

  I’ll apologize for the rough treatment later.

  Kaboom.

  Everyone smashes into the ground like skydivers whose chutes never opened, and that takes the fight out of everyone but good. I’m the only one standing for several minutes. I think I’ve figured out Matt’s gravity bomb trick. Go me.

  “Sorry about that,” I say, “but you were all fighting the wrong people. Or beings. Or whatever.”

  “Moernukr,” Squishy says.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  It’s my turn to help up the lead alien. She looks around at the wide, shallow crater my little stunt has created and nods as if impressed.

  “Ce’ut tes iresian,” she says. “Vore comde de’vs cacit’e adiral.”

  “You can understand her?” Matt says. “It? Him?”

  “Her, I think,” I say, “and no, I can’t understand her, but I’m fairly certain she can understand me.”

  She nods.

  “I don’t suppose she brought an interpreter with her,” Sara says, “because I’d really like to know what the hell is going on.”

  The alien holds up two fingers again then makes a come here gesture to Squishy. He waddles over and produces from a belt pouch two more little globs. She takes them and presses them into my —

  “Gyaahh! Aww, God, what are these things?” I groan as goop like warm peanut butter fills my ears.

  “Translators,” she says in flawless English. “Techno-organic learning matrices. Hopefully, I’ve enabled you to communicate with me.”

  “Or you’ve fried her primitive little brain,” Gorilla Rex says, the movements of his mouth not quite matching the sounds he makes, like a character in a badly dubbed foreign film.

  “Primitive?” I say.

  The female alien smiles. “I would say not. What is your name?”

  “Uh, Carrie...Carrie Hauser.”

  “CarrieHauser,” she says, cramming my first and last name into a single word. “I am Commander Do Lidella Det of the Vanguard.”

  “Carrie?” Matt says.

  “Hold on, Matt, I’m a little busy playing intergalactic ambassador,” I say. “Like I don’t have enough to do already.”

  “Sorry, but I’ve had Concorde screaming in my ear for ten solid minutes,” Matt says, tapping the comm system built into his mask, “and he needs you back at the beach yesterday.”

  “Why? What’s happening?”

  “You know the big honkin’ spaceship hanging out over the water?”

  “Yeah...”

  “Yeah, it’s not going to be over the water much longer,” Matt says.

  4.

  After retrieving my headset and, with some fiddling, synching it to Commander Do’s communications channel, I book it back to the beach. Commander Do flies point with me, and her entourage and their flying space arrowhead, piloted by Tripod (real name First Rank At Mo Ke), play the role of wingmen. Wingaliens. Wingthings.

  We arrive to find that Kingsport Heights Beach has become a full-fledged warzone. As we come in, we pass over a spreading ground war that’s already consumed the beachfront and the command base-slash-parking lot and is creeping onto the baseball field. On one side, man-sized mechs, or possibly aliens in bulky suits, spew forth from a dozen or so small transports parked along the shore. They swarm the area, spraying hypervelocity rounds — bullets that travel so fast they start to burn up the second they leave the
barrel. They appear as white streaks of light, but let me stress: they are not firing lasers. I’ve spent too much time with Matt and Edison to mistake hypervelocity rounds for lasers — not that it matters much because hypervelocity rounds are just as lethal. They can punch through conventional body armor like it was paper and do serious damage to vehicle armor plating.

  On the other side are men and women with guns — trained, yeah, but there’s no training in the world that’ll prepare you for an alien invasion — and the Protectorate, supported from above by the Raptor, which is selectively dropping scramblers into the melee. One goes off over the beachhead, flattening a cluster of invaders. They’re not invulnerable, so that’s a bright spot.

  The good guys might not be outnumbered or even outgunned, but I don’t see that lasting long because there’s one last factor to consider: the dreadnought. This is my first close-up look at it, and dear God is it enormous. I feel like I’m getting ready to attack the Chrysler Building. So far it’s not directly joining the fight — there’s still no indication the ship itself is packing weaponry — but in a few minutes it’s going to make landfall, and those jets are going to reduce the landscape and every living thing on it to ash. A cloud of thick steam rolls in like a fogbank ahead of the dreadnought as it makes its slow, inexorable advance.

  “Concorde, we’re coming in hot,” I say, “I need a sitrep!”

  “We?” Concorde says.

  “I’ll explain later, just don’t shoot any of my wingmen. They’re with me.”

  Concorde rolls with it. Even in the middle of pure batcrap insanity like this, he’s unflappable.

  “Our air support’s dry,” he says. “They unloaded everything they had into the dreadnought and it didn’t so much as scratch the paintjob. My concussion blasts are useless, too. Might as well be throwing snowballs at it.”

  “Commander Do, tell me we can stop this thing from making landfall.”

  “Perhaps with time,” she says, her translated voice clear enough through a steady hiss of static. Our comm systems aren’t in perfect harmony with each other, but it’s good enough to keep us in touch. “A coordinated attack on a vulnerable point could penetrate the hull.”