Isaac in his angel form dove into me, shoulder first, like a football player tackling a defenseless receiver. Something inside of me cracked. A rib maybe. I was flung to the side, hitting the ground back first. My body exploded with fresh pain, proving that you could make water wetter. I slid for a bit on the smooth rock surface with Isaac on top of me. An instant later, one of the fragments of the V’Loth ship hit the floor right where I had just been kneeling. If I had still been there, it would’ve brained me. Obviously it had been shaken loose from its mooring by the faux earthquake.
Isaac lay on top of me with his huge white wings folded around me, shielding me from falling bits of rock from the cavern’s ceiling. He stayed there, wrapped around me protectively, until the rumbling around us lessened and then finally died off entirely.
“If someone walked in on us right now, we’d have a hard time convincing them we’re not actually boyfriends like I told your boss,” Isaac said into my ear once the shaking and rattling ended. Thanks to whatever was wrong with my ears, I barely heard him.
“You saved my life. Thanks.” I spit out a tooth chip. My throat felt like I had gargled with glass shards. It hurt to talk. It hurt to everything.
“No. I saved your life again. I’ve done it before, remember?”
Isaac’s weight was on my chest. “Grateful, but can’t breathe,” I rasped.
“Oh! Sorry.” Isaac scrambled to his feet. Bits of rock and other debris sloughed off his broad wings and back, pattering like rain on the hard floor. The pressure on my chest lessened, but was not gone. Isaac shimmered and changed from his bare-chested angel form back into his usual self. Other than a gash on his cheek, he seemed none the worse for wear. I wished I could say the same. I felt like a dishrag that had been wrung dry, had holes shot through it, and then set on fire, with the resulting ashes then ground to a fine powder.
“Myth’s my name, saving Omegas is my game,” Isaac said as he brushed himself off. Despite his flippant words, Isaac seemed awestruck by what I had managed to do to the neutronium spear. The look on his face told me he was for the first time taking seriously the notion that I was the Omega. “You okay? You look worse than you did when we came here, and that’s saying something.”
“Been better.” This was one of those times I wished Isaac didn’t talk so much. My ears hurt, not to mention everything else. It was hard to hear. It was hard concentrating on anything other than breathing. If it weren’t for the fact moving hurt too much, I would be writhing in pain right now. “Think you broke a rib.”
“Better a broken rib than a broken neck.” Isaac glanced over at the fallen neutronium spear. “I’ve gotta admit I’m pretty impressed with you right now. You moved the damned thing. Shall we go see what awaits us under the Christmas tree?”
Since I could not get up on my own, all I could do was nod weakly. Isaac bent over and helped me to my feet. Though I felt like I had been broken and then pieced back together again by a five-year-old with string and Silly Putty, with assistance, I could walk.
Supported by Isaac, I hobbled over to where the neutronium spear lay on its side. A zigzagging crack a couple of feet deep and several inches wide ran from where the spear had fallen all the way to the distant wall the tip of it pointed at. The crack looked like the Grand Canyon in miniature.
With the spear overturned, a cavity was revealed. It was several inches deep and right under where the flat base of the spear had once rested. Lying inside the cavity was a red cape, folded into a square with military precision. Though it looked just like the capes hanging from the mannequins, this had to be what we were looking for. Why else would Avatar hide it under the neutronium spear?
“Help me down,” I said weakly to Isaac. He lowered me to my knees. Blood dripped from my face, splattering the floor. A wave of nausea and vertigo washed over me, almost making me topple, before I steadied myself against Isaac’s leg.
My hand shook with a combination of nerves, excitement, and pain as I extended it toward the folded cape. Though my experiences with the other capes made me halfway expect nothing to happen, I still felt the way King Arthur must have felt when he tried to pull Excalibur from the stone. Assuming Arthur had been shoved into a burlap bag and beaten with sticks first.
My hand touched the cape. The light of a thousand suns exploded right in front of my eyes. Isaac, The Mountain, and everything else were swept away like dust before a broom.
I fell over, into oblivion.
22
The plan had gone to complete shit.
The smoke from Baltimore’s burning buildings rose from below in thick, dark, hot, toxic plumes. It got into my eyes, partly blinding me. I tried to blink away my sweat and the smoke-induced irritation. My hard blinks almost made me miss a silver V’Loth spaceship emerging from the smoke right in front of me, like a shark out of the murky depths of the ocean.
Knowing from prior experience my force fields would protect me from direct impacts with the ships but were entirely useless against the V’Loths’ energy missiles, I darted down and to the left in the air. A glowing energy pulse from the ship missed me by inches, and was swallowed by the surrounding smoke. The near miss singed my right side, even with my protective Kinetic suit on. A howl of pain escaped my lips. It was like being branded with a giant red-hot poker.
The tiny device lodged in my ear buzzed with angry static, setting my teeth on edge. It was a combination transmitter and receiver designed by Mechano which was supposed to allow us Heroes to coordinate our attack on the V’Loths. Its frequencies were no doubt being jammed by the aliens. Though there were Heroes all around me in the smoke, with our communications down, I might as well have been alone.
The buzzing in my ear mingled with the faint screams of other Heroes, the high-pitched whines of countless V’Loth ships as they cut through the air in pursuit of us, the bone-rattling explosions all around me, and the crackling fires below. It was a scene out of Dante’s Inferno.
Yeah, there was no doubt about it:
The plan had gone to complete shit.
Nothing had gone well ever since the V’Loth ships had unexpectedly appeared in the sky over every major city on the planet weeks ago. The date they had shown up—August 12, 1966—would no doubt be a date which would live in infamy. Assuming humanity itself lived.
For fifteen days the V’Loth ships had hung in the sky, completely motionless, like they had been painted there. None of us knew at the time that V’Loth was the name of their species. That knowledge came later. When they appeared, the V’Loths had ignored all attempts at communication by the United Nations and the world’s governments. Even when the Soviet Union’s fighter jets opened fire on the spaceships hovering over Moscow—a proud people, the Soviets always have had more machismo than prudence—the spaceships ignored the jets’ missiles like a sleeping giant would ignore gnats. The missiles did no more damage to the spaceships than a water balloon would do to a tank.
After the initial excitement and fear wore off, people got used to the alien ships hanging in the sky. They became as much of a fixture there as the sun, the moon, or the stars from whence the V’Loths had apparently come. Politicians debated endlessly about what to do. They wound up doing nothing. That was hardly new. For most of humanity, life returned to normal.
Humanity’s endless adaptability was why we had become the dominant species on Earth. I and many other Heroes were still nervous every time we looked up at the spaceships, though. We had seen too much over the years to be blasé about the hovering objects. There was talk about banding together into some sort of Heroes’ Guild for the purpose of building a space station to warn us if another group of aliens approached Earth. Mechano apparently had even begun the design work on it. Though it wasn’t a bad idea, building a space station after the V’Loths’ arrival struck me as being like locking the barn door after the horse had already been stolen.
No one knew what the V’Loths were doing as their still ships hovered silently. Napping, perhaps, tired after th
eir journey across the stars. Monitoring American television and trying to make heads or tails out of The Beverly Hillbillies, maybe.
Or, more likely as it turned out, deciding on the best way to wipe out humanity root and branch.
Humanity’s reign as the world’s dominant species ended abruptly sixteen days after the V’Loth ships appeared. Like a switch had been flipped, all the ships around the world abruptly came to life. They launched surgically precise yet devastating energy blasts at the cities below them. Millions were killed, including several Heroes. Millions more were injured.
In a matter of minutes, the world’s great cities were incapacitated. As the cities were the centers of government, technology, culture, and finance, humanity itself was largely incapacitated. Fortunately, thanks to the United States’ Hero Act of 1945 and similar laws enacted in other countries, the world had Heroes to defend it. Unfortunately, the V’Loths easily defeated the Heroes who took them on. With the world’s various governments crippled, our Heroic counterattacks against the V’Loths were too haphazard and uncoordinated. A guild of Heroes which could organize our defense efforts looked like an even better idea than before, but it was too late for that now. The milk had already been spilled.
It took several days, far longer than it would have if we had some sort of centralized organization, but many of the surviving Heroes from around the world met to try to figure out what to do about the V’Loth threat. I and my wife Neha, aka the Hero Smoke, of course attended. While there, Laser Lass told us all she had heard of a kid in Nebraska whose telepathic powers had recently manifested thanks to him hitting puberty. He allegedly had tapped into the V’Loths’ minds and could provide intelligence on them.
Being desperate to find anything that would help us combat the V’Loths, a couple of Heroes were dispatched to look into the kid. It turned out that the 13-year-old boy wasn’t a dead end as we suspected he might be. Telepaths were as uncommon as hen’s teeth, after all. The vast majority of people who claimed they were telepathic were either frauds, con men, or crazy. But this kid was the real deal. His name was Vaughn Hope. Fitting, because Vaughn was our last, best hope to defeat the alien menace.
Technically, it was of course illegal for Vaughn to use his powers as he was not licensed to do so. As humanity was under an existential threat, none of us Heroes quibbled about encouraging Vaughn to use his powers to help us. We needed to do what had to be done.
Thanks to Vaughn’s powers and him burrowing into the aliens’ minds, we learned much about the menace we faced: The aliens called themselves the V’Loths. In English, their name translated into “The People,” which says just about all that needs to be said as to how the V’Loths viewed every race that was not them. To them, humans were little more than mold that needed to be cut off the loaf of bread that was Earth.
Like many wasps and ants here on Earth, V’Loth society had a hive-based hierarchical structure. When a new V’Loth queen was born, she left the world she was born on along with a V’Loth armada that was under her telepathic control. The V’Loth queens were the only V’Loths with any real intelligence; the drones in their armadas were little more than cannon fodder, as intelligent as fingers moving at the command of a brain. A newly born V’Loth queen would then find a suitable new world to make her own. In that fashion, the V’Loths had conquered numerous worlds through the galaxy. Unfortunately, Earth was the planet this particular V’Loth queen had set her colonizing sights on even though our atmosphere was toxic to her. If she left her spacecraft, she would have to wear an elaborate life support suit to survive. The V’Loths planned on terraforming Earth to make its atmosphere more palatable to them after humanity was taken care of.
If you killed the queen, the rest of the V’Loths would be crippled, Vaughn’s powers told us. It would be like cutting the head off a snake—the rest of the snake’s body might continue to twitch, but it would no longer be a threat.
Based on what we learned from Vaughn, what we needed to do was clear: Find the V’Loth queen and kill her. With the rest of the V’Loth fleet around the world rendered impotent, we could then mop them up at our leisure. Heroes normally didn’t kill, of course, but this was not a normal situation. The information we gleaned from Vaughn about the V’Loths made it apparent there was no way to resolve this situation peacefully. You couldn’t negotiate with a race of people who did not even view you as a sentient person. If a gnat buzzed around your head, did you try to reason with it, or did you simply swat it? That’s how the V’Loths saw us: annoying gnats to be swatted.
Vaughn sensed that the V’Loth queen was in one of the ships hovering over Baltimore, Maryland, but he could not tell exactly which ship without getting closer to her. So, the plan was to take Vaughn to Baltimore. His parents did not even blink at us putting him in danger this way. As James Conley II—my and Neha’s son—was about Vaughn’s age, I could appreciate how terrified his parents must have been at us needing to take Vaughn to Baltimore and put him in harm’s way. But, they were both former Marines. They knew both what was at stake and about making sacrifices for the greater good.
Once Vaughn pinpointed the ship the V’Loth queen was in, we planned to take it out. We assembled the greatest Metahuman force the world had ever known to do so. Every Hero we could get a hold of participated, along with several Rogues who were deemed trustworthy enough.
As plans went, it seemed a good one. It was nice and simple, as all the best plans were, since that meant there were less things to go wrong. Step One of the V’Loth plan: Go to Baltimore. Step Two: Find the V’Loth queen. Step Three: Kill the queen. Step Four: High-five each other.
The plan went to hell the moment Wormhole simultaneously transported all of us to various points in Baltimore near the alien ships. An energy pulse from one of the spaceships vaporized Vaughn the instant he materialized. I knew because I was one of the Heroes assigned to guard him. I witnessed the 13-year-old’s death with my own horrified eyes. The pulse had sailed through the force field I had erected around Vaughn as if it did not exist. Vaughn was reduced to flecks of ash in an instant. I couldn’t inform the rest of the Metahuman assault force because the communications system Mechano had designed was useless, presumably jammed by the V’Loths.
After Vaughn was killed, the next energy pulse killed Wormhole, another of the bodyguards assigned to Vaughn. Wormhole was supposed to transport us all out of Baltimore if things went sideways.
They most definitely had.
I wasn’t sure what had happened. My best guess was that the whole thing had been a trap, and that the V’Loth queen had let Vaughn into her thoughts to lure us to Baltimore so the aliens could eliminate most of the world’s Heroes in one fell swoop. With us gone, no one would be able to stand between the V’Loths and world domination. But that was just a guess. It was not as though the V’Loth queen would have me over for a spot of tea so we could braid each other’s hair—assuming she even had hair—and gab about world-conquering strategies.
At any rate, that was why I was swooping around the skies of Baltimore, surrounded by total chaos, trying to avoid the fate Vaughn, Wormhole, and too many others had suffered.
I wondered if Neha was still alive. My side, singed by the energy pulse I had just dodged, felt like it was on fire. Teeth gritted, I tried to put the pain out of my mind and focus on evading the continuing blasts from the V’Loth ship that pursued me. It chased me the way a cat chases a mouse, matching my shifting path through the sky. Despite the fact it was as big as a box truck, it was as agile a flier as I was. It was as hard to shake as a bad cold.
Normally, in a situation like this, I would use my telekinesis to immobilize or crush the object that pursued me. I couldn’t get a solid lock on the spaceship following me, though. Whatever super-dense material the silver ship was made of resisted my powers. Trying to grab onto it was like trying to cling to a fistful of air.
Everything around me was a blur. I dodged and weaved, trying to shake the pursuing craft so I could take stock of
the overall situation and help my fellow embattled Metahumans. I spotted another V’Loth ship ahead and above me. Though I could see it only hazily through the smoke, that didn’t prevent me from seeing it blast an airborne Hero out of existence with an energy pulse.
A few Heroes had managed to destroy or incapacitate some of the ships, but there were far more of them than there were of us. They were killing us at a greater rate than we were killing them. It was a battle of attrition we were most definitely losing. Somebody had to do something, and do it soon before all was lost.
Since communications were down and I couldn’t coordinate strategy with anyone, I guess I didn’t have a choice: That somebody was going to have to be me.
Fantastic.
Before I could step back and look at the big picture though, I’d have to deal with the ship on my tail. It clung to me like a dog’s tick, matching my aerial maneuvers with disheartening ease, spitting energy pulses at me all the while. In fact, the ship matched my movements so precisely, I wondered how much intelligence went into the ship following me. The V’Loth queen was the only one with real intelligence and the drone ships were essentially dumb brutes. Maybe this drone staying on my tail like this wasn’t the result of deliberate thought but instead instinctual, like a dog chasing a car.
It gave me an idea.
I knew from a previous collision that, though my force field was ineffective against the ships’ energy blasts, it would protect me from a direct impact with the ships. I changed my trajectory, arcing up at full speed toward the ship that had just vaporized the other Hero. The spaceship pursuing me of course followed.
Omega Superhero Box Set Page 74
