The ground fighters stagger in, their conditions ranging from relatively untouched to Oh my God how are you still alive? Yankee Spirit is a mess. The Amazon carries him in like a mother carrying her child and sets him on the floor, which he proceeds to bleed all over.
“Astrid, I need another evac,” Nina says, stooping down over Yankee Spirit. “You guys might want to look away for a minute,” she says over her shoulder. “And cover your ears. And hold your nose.”
She doesn’t wait for us to comply before she sets about the gruesome task of cauterizing Yankee Spirit’s many bullet wounds. To his credit, the man doesn’t scream once.
Dr. Enigma warps in as Nina finishes up. “Ew,” she says in such an off-hand way it suggests she’s seen much, much worse. “How’s everyone else?”
“Sore,” Stuart says. “When did the Thrashers get hypervelocity guns?”
“Question for another time,” Nina says. “Astrid, get Yank out of here.”
“Nina, we have a small army waiting for us downstairs,” I say. “What’s the call?”
“How far down?”
“Fiftyish feet?”
“Superbeast, Iron, Amazon. Go say hello.”
Without a word or a moment’s hesitation, all three of them jump over the railing. I find the chorus of surprised yelps that follows oddly satisfying.
“Ladies, Entity, we’re going to let the tanks keep the foot soldiers occupied while we have a look around,” Nina says. “Forget the Foreman. I’m making an executive decision: we need to find the base’s nerve center and see if we can shut the Thrashers down before they tear us apart.”
“Little late for that,” the Entity says.
“Things can always get worse,” Nina notes.
The only way down is a pair of freight elevators. We pile into one of the cars and descend. As we drop, the din of the firefight in the sky above us fades, replaced by the mayhem of the brawl below us.
“Give us a shield,” Nina says to me. “I don’t want to get perforated before we reach the bottom.”
I do as told, but it’s a strain. Protecting the Quantums drained most of my energy and simply keeping myself upright is using up what little I have left.
As we near the end of the line, Nina scans the area for our exit. Of course it’s on the other side of the staging area, which is as wide as my high school gym and currently thick with gun-toting henchpeople — although, thanks to our three bruisers, that crowd is thinning rapidly.
“Shift, scout that exit,” Nina says. Shift vanishes from the car with a soft whff of displaced air, leaving behind the smell of ozone and a wispy fog. She reappears near the exit. She pokes her head through the door and waves to us: all clear.
The elevator stops. I keep my shield up as we skirt the edge of the staging area, doing our best to slip by unnoticed. A few stray bullets ping off my shield. They’re normal everyday bullets as far as I can tell, but I’m so wasted each one lands with the impact of a wrecking ball.
I drop the shield as soon as we’re through the door. I struggle to keep up with Nina and Missy as they sprint down a corridor lit by red emergency lights.
“Do you know where we’re going?” Missy asks.
“Nope,” Nina admits.
Missy suddenly dashes past Nina and ricochets off a wall, parkouring right into a pair of goons arriving late to the party. She takes one to the ground with her, leaving the other to Nina’s tender mercies — which I say ironically because Nina’s neither tender nor merciful. She lays into the poor dope with a quick series of fists and elbows before violently introducing her knee to his groin. He sags to the floor in slow motion.
Nina hauls him upright by the hair. “Hi. My friend’s a telepath,” she says, nodding toward me. “Tell me where I can find the nerve center for this place or she’s going to pull the info out of your brain, and trust me, that’ll make what I did to you feel like a kiss on the cheek.”
I give the guard my best sinister smile, hoping it’s enough to convince him to play ball. My focus is so shot I’m hesitant to attempt anything more than a surface scan. I might easily do more harm than good. Fortunately, the guy’s a team player. He points us down a side corridor, toward an elevator, and tells us to go one level down. Nina thanks him with a brutal kick to the head. The goon’s skull bounces off the wall, and he collapses, out cold.
Getting to the nerve center is easy. Getting into it, however...
“This sucker’s solid,” Nina says, rapping a fist on a steel door that looks like it belongs on a bank vault.
“And locked down. Whoever’s in there most likely sealed themselves in when we attacked,” Shift says.
Nina looks at her. “There’s no way I can burn through this.”
Shift nods, closes her eyes, then risks a blind teleport — something she’s perfectly capable of pulling off but generally chooses not to because teleporting into a solid object would be a horrible way to die. Over my comm, I hear several voices crying out in surprise. Someone shouts, “Get her!”
A moment later, the door pops open.
Nina pushes it aside. Missy slips by and charges in. She streaks across the chamber beyond, a round room lined with monitors and terminals. She pounces on a man as he’s attempting to fumble a gun out of a holster under his arm. He manages to let slip a high-pitched shriek before Missy hits him high and pins him to his console. On my right, Nina throws a wave of fire at another guy, who immediately curls into a fetal position on the floor and whimpers like a frightened puppy. Shift drops a third goon, a woman, with a lunging side kick to the gut. The Entity levels goon number four with a sledgehammer punch. The fifth and final minion throws his hands up in surrender, putting them as far away from the gun at his hip as they can possibly get. These people are not fighters. They look like they should be manning the help desk at Microsoft.
“You,” Nina says. “Deactivate the Thrashers. NOW.”
He stammers for a second. “Deactivate them? I can’t do that.”
Nina strides up to him, jerks him onto his feet, and holds up her free hand so he can clearly see the flames dancing in the air above her palm. “Do it or I’ll melt your face off.”
The face in question erupts in sweat. “No, I mean I literally can’t,” he says, his voice rising an octave.
“You don’t have a kill switch for those battlesuits?”
“What, you mean like the Air Force has for all its planes?”
Nina curses under her breath. “Fine. If we can’t shut them down, you’re going to shoot them down — or are you going to tell me you don’t have a surface-to-air defense system either?”
The man’s expression hardens. “That, I won’t do,” he says, his fear suddenly absent. There it is again, that mindboggling loyalty to this mysterious organization — loyalty, or the knowledge that anything we might do to him pales in comparison to what “they” will do to him if he turns traitor.
“We’ll see,” Nina says. The flames leap higher, burn hotter.
“No,” I say, shoving her aside. We might be desperate, but I can’t stand by and let her torture a man — although what I have in mind might end up being much worse than an all-over third degree burn.
Going into another person’s head is not always easy. When the other person lets you in or doesn’t know what’s coming, it’s like stepping through an open door. But if that person is in self-defense mode, the door to his mind closes, which means I have to break it down. I can normally do that without any serious effort since the vast majority of people don’t have a clue how to fend off a telepathic intrusion, but I’m not in top form right now. Breaking down his metaphorical door isn’t the concern; my worry is that I’ll push too hard and completely trash the room behind the door. I could wind up psychically lobotomizing this man.
He could wind up like my parents.
No. I can’t even entertain that outcome. Don’t let that happen. Focus.
I jump into the goon’s brain, looking for specific information. Again, this is
n’t always easy. I’m searching for a specific book in a vast library without helpful signs on the shelves or a card catalog to refer to. Luckily, because Nina inquired about the base’s defense systems, the subject is very much on the man’s mind. I find what I need and take a crash course in the operation of the base’s air defense systems.
I push him away — along with a sudden dizzy spell — sit at his workstation, and start typing. “Heads up, everyone. This is Psyche,” I say. My fingers fly over the keyboard, totally on autopilot; my conscious mind has no idea what I’m doing. “You have five seconds to clear the sky. Put as much distance between yourselves and the island as you can because it’s about to get messy.”
I check a screen to my left, a radar display of the airspace above and surrounding the island. Three red dots, each labeled BOGEY, break away from a swarm of green dots. Wait, three? There should be a fourth red dot. Did someone get shot down?
Worry about it later, Sara. Do what you need to do. Bring your friends home alive.
The red dots move out over the ocean. The green dots change course to pursue. A few keystrokes lock the base’s surface-to-air missile batteries onto the green dots. I enter the launch code and jab the RETURN key with a finger. The radar display briefly lights up with a series of yellow dots. The screen flashes white, and every green dot winks out of existence, almost simultaneously. The man whose mind I robbed lets out a groan.
I slump in my chair and stare at the monitors, which are linked to a net of security cameras secreted across the island. Tangled wrecks of downed Thrashers fill several screens. One suit struggles to flip onto its belly and continue the fight despite the fact it no longer has legs. Another twitches for a few seconds, as if in a death throe, and then falls still.
In movies, a moment like this would be met with rousing cheers from the good guys. There’s no such moment of celebration here.
There’s nothing but silence.
THIRTY-FOUR
It takes us a few days to fully assess the aftermath of the raid. The final result barely qualifies as a win.
Yankee Spirit is out of the super-hero game for good. The only reason he’s alive at all is because Astrid teleported him to the nearest hospital in the proverbial nick of time. Doctors managed to save both legs, and I hear they’ve already located a donor liver, but he’ll never be one hundred percent again.
Bart stands a much better chance of making a full recovery. The Pelican took a bad hit and crash-landed right after Astrid warped out with Yankee Spirit. Bart suffered several cracked ribs and screwed up his neck and back, but there’s nothing wrong with him that several weeks of bed rest and several more weeks of intense physical therapy can’t rectify. He’ll be on the red list in the interim.
Side note: Astrid’s beating herself up hard over Bart’s injuries. I actually feel bad for her. Had she been on the Pelican, where she was supposed to be, she could have warped him to safety. Bart isn’t holding it against her — risks of the job and all that — but that didn’t stop Astrid from indulging in a guilt-fueled bender.
Joe Quentin is back on the red list, poor guy. His recovery is going to take longer this time around, but he’ll bounce back — as will everyone else on the strike team, who walked away with a nice collection of bumps, bruises, sprains, strains, cuts, a concussion or two, and general exhaustion.
And what did we score in exchange for this fine assortment of injuries? Well, we didn’t nab the Foreman, nor did we dig up any clues as to where he might be. We scoured the base top to bottom and grilled our prisoners at length, but all we got was one weak-willed foot soldier telling us he hadn’t seen or heard from his boss for a few weeks. The base had been running under “last given orders protocol,” which mostly involved the base staff carrying on with their respective duties and waiting for someone to tell them what to do next.
One of those respective duties proved fascinating but horrifying.
Once the dust settled and we began rounding up prisoners, Edison cracked open one of the Thrashers. The pilot wasn’t simply wearing the battlesuit; he was hardwired into it, almost fused with it. That’s why the things moved so quickly compared to the older model: the suits had become an extension of the pilots’ nervous systems. The Thrashers’ heads had been replaced by an array of visual sensors placed around the upper chassis, which fed directly into the pilots’ brains, giving them a three hundred-sixty-degree view of their surroundings.
We’ve seen that level of technology in only one other place: aboard the Nightwind.
Archimedes called the base a research facility, and what they were researching was ways to adapt the Nightwind tech. In the deepest level of the base, we found dismantled alien battlesuits, weapons, gadgets with no immediately discernible function, and the cradle removed from the Nightwind’s bridge. There’s no way to tell if we recovered everything taken from the ship, but Edison says we should assume the worst, that some of the hardware — or at the very least, the knowledge gleaned from taking it apart and studying it — is out there and accessible to any bad guy with the right connections and resources.
It’s also impossible to tell whether we crushed the operation. We thought we had once before, but its revival only proved that we have no idea how big it truly is. Again, Edison told us to assume the worst, that the organization is alive and well and plotting revenge against us.
Done and done — but I have a more immediate, personal issue to deal with first.
We took on fifteen Thrashers. Four of them were out of commission before my team reached the control room. The rest went down in the missile barrage that I launched. Five of the pilots didn’t survive.
It didn’t hit me until two days later, at which point I locked myself in my room, curled into a ball, and cried for hours. I told myself it couldn’t have been avoided, that the pilots were all bad people who would’ve killed us without hesitation, that I made a tough call that saved my friends’ lives. None of it helped. No rationalization I conjured up made me feel one little bit better about the fact people died because of me.
I’ve killed once before, when I snapped the King of Pain’s neck, but I honestly don’t remember it — the single dubious benefit of being on the tail end of a major psychotic break. I can’t claim amnesia this time, only a pathetic ignorance that doesn’t excuse my actions: I never took a moment to see the Thrashers as people. At the time, they were nothing but big mechs trying to kill people I love. They weren’t human. They were targets. They were The Enemy. That’s all they were.
No one’s judging me. Every single member of the Protectorate has taken a life before — never maliciously or willingly, always because they were cornered and had absolutely no other recourse, but they’ve taken lives and completely understand what I’m going through. It’s mildly comforting, but it’s not enough to purge me of my guilt. Bart promises me we’ll work through it together, but I worry I’m going to be in therapy for one reason or another for the rest of my life — and that no matter how much good I do in the world, I’ll always have something I feel compelled to atone for, and I’ll never balance the scales, karmically speaking.
On that note...
***
With Mindforce laid up, Concorde assigns me to the security detail that will escort Archimedes from Byrne to a US Marshals office for final processing. Concorde’s deeply unhappy that we have to set him free despite our failure to apprehend the Foreman, but that wasn’t part of the bargain. Archimedes gave us actionable intelligence that panned out, and that’s all we asked him for.
An armored transport, dubbed “the hearse” by the prison staff, rolls up to the prison’s secure entrance while Concorde, Nina, Stuart, and I stand by among a contingent of a half-dozen heavily armed Byrne guards. The human brick wall that is Warden Pearce looms over all of us, arms crossed, a scowl etched deep into his dark face.
Archimedes steps out and squints under the glare of a sun he hasn’t seen with his own eyes for months. It’s also the first time in months — more tha
n a year, now that I think about it — that he gets to wear something other than a prison jumpsuit. He’s traded in his orange pajamas for a pair of jeans and a plain black T-shirt. Add to that the fact he’s begun to grow out his facial hair in anticipation of adopting a new identity and he’s practically unrecognizable. He pauses for a moment, glances back over his shoulder at the prison as if fearful it’s going to follow him, then climbs into the hearse.
Stuart rides shotgun. Nina and I ride in the back with Archimedes and the guards while Concorde takes off to monitor the transport from the sky. We’re not taking any chances. The last two times someone tried to transport Archimedes somewhere, someone tried to break him out. Here’s hoping the third time’s the charm.
His eyes wander around, landing briefly on each of his escorts. Under different circumstances I’d say he was plotting an escape and looking for vulnerabilities to exploit.
“You don’t seem very happy,” he says to Nina.
I almost laugh. With her goggles and bandana in place, you can’t read her expression at all — and yet, I have to say Archimedes’ assessment is dead on.
“You shouldn’t be going free,” Nina says.
“I fulfilled my end of the deal,” Archimedes counters.
“Not what I’m talking about. You murdered a man. A year in prison is hardly punishment for that.”
Archimedes holds up a finger. “Technically, Roger Manfred killed a man.”
“You gave him a motive and you gave him the means. That makes you an accomplice. There’s blood on your hands too.”
Archimedes’ gaze shifts to me. “What about you, Sara? Do you also think I haven’t been punished for my crimes?”
Nina’s right; he may not have pulled the trigger, so to speak, but Archimedes is responsible for ending Ashe Semler’s life. He also held my entire high school hostage, tried to kill me and my friends, aided and abetted the Foreman and his various cronies, and he hasn’t been held accountable for any of it. Thanks to the deal he cut, he never will.
Action Figures - Issue Six: Power Play Page 28
