by Zack Archer
“Anybody got the key to open that roof?” Kaptain Khaos asked, pointing up.
“I’ve got your key right here!” Aurora replied, before stomping down on the sled’s accelerator.
The machine rocketed straight up, shattering the clear roof as we zoomed outside to see that we were a good hundred feet off the ground, flying over a rear courtyard and the back fence.
Liberty gasped and pointed. We looked back and up to see a stronger, wider pulse of light beaming from the broken windows on the back of the Polymath’s lair.
Whatever energy the Polymath was summoning, had grown exponentially stronger.
The beam was wider, brighter, and looked like it was about to overcome the entire tower.
The light speared from the tower across the valley, ending at the wall on the other side. Given the distance between where the beam ended and our then-current position, nothing was entirely clear, but the beam seemed to be chewing a hole through the bedrock.
“There it is!” Atlas shouted, from behind the controls of the other wave sled.
“AND THERE THEY ARE!” Aurora replied.
I looked sideways, and that’s when I noticed that the valley was full of what looked like robots and mechanized fighting machines.
The bad guys were here, and by the looks of things, they had indeed brought a mechanical army with them.
25
Aurora looked back at us. “We’re officially ‘Triple-Oh’ now.”
“Translate,” I said.
“On. Our. Own.”
Awesome. We were trapped in an underground world without any aid or assistance, sandwiched between a bunch of marauding robots and their villainous overlords, and a bridge that led to a land of monsters. Could it get any worse?
“I should’ve taken the day off,” I whispered to myself.
Lyric looked over. “What?”
“Back on Earth. If I’d never gone to work today, none of this shit would’ve ever happened.”
She reached into the folds of her singlet and pulled out her puppets, Beatrix and Barney. “But that’s the point, Quincy. All of this was destined to happen,” she said in her puppet voice.
“You keep saying that.”
“Because once you’ve lived several hundred years, you realize one thing: there are no coincidences. Even your idiotic decision to bring the rabbit with the tracking device in it was preordained.”
BOOM!
An explosive detonated on the ground below us, the blast shunting our wave sled sideways.
I white-knuckled our handhold as Aurora took evasive action, maneuvering down toward the ground, following after the other sled.
“How do we know where they are?” I asked.
Aurora pointed to a circular piece of metal that was pinned to her outfit. “It’s an early warning device. If the Morningstars are near, it will let us know.”
We picked up speed, zipping a few feet off the ground, but it was clear we wouldn’t be able to reach the hole in the far-off wall.
Aurora’s warning device began vibrating wildly.
The bad guys had apparently cut us off.
There were over a hundred robots and other fighting machines between us and where we needed to go.
We’d have to fight our way out now.
“OFF!” Aurora shouted. “EVERYONE OFF! WE HAVE TO MAKE READY!”
I scrambled down over the side of the sled and hit the ground.
Liberty and Lyric did the same along with Splinter and Kaptain Khaos, who were waving for us to follow them.
The wave sleds, piloted by Aurora and Atlas lifted up and hovered over us as we charged across the pumice, readying to meet the Morningstars and their mechanized fighting forces.
We took up positions behind a rocky knoll.
I crouched between Lyric and Liberty, who had unsheathed her swords. I looked over to see Splinter and Kaptain Khaos, twenty yards from us, taking up positions behind a gravel berm. The heads-up display on my eye-mask zoomed in and then a counter began spinning, tallying the number of approaching bad guys who were hundreds of yards away. I powered the damn thing down by the time it reached sixty-seven bad guys. Sixty-seven against seven!
Rising up behind us, yet hovering only a few feet off the ground, were the two wave sleds. Atlas held up a balled fist as he breezed past us.
“THIS IS ABOUT WHETHER WE STAND OR KNEEL!” the big man roared. “GIVE NO GROUND!”
The wave sleds took up a position between us. Aurora and Atlas keyed what they called an active camouflage application that altered the exterior of their sleds, making them damn near invisible. Everyone else made themselves small behind the knoll and berm, waiting for the bad guys to arrive.
The air soon filled with dust kicked up by the approaching enemy. I could hear what sounded like pistons hammering and popping, along with the mechanical whine made by an engine when it’s straining.
I snuck a glance over the knoll and wished I hadn’t.
The mechanized fighting machines that were lumbering toward us were fifteen or twenty feet tall.
They looked like the offspring of a mech out of some old graphic novel and a battle tank.
The fighting machines were powered by two bulky legs that rose to twin turrets, which sported a number of cannons and other weaponry.
There were thirty or forty of the machines along with several dozen soldier drones that carried rifles and ran on two legs, dressed in orange and black body armor, with smoked visors covering their faces.
The heads-up display on my eye-mask read:
Name/Moniker: General Purpose Drone
Status: Synthetic Enemy Combatant – Fully Weaponized
Feats: None
Notes: None
One of the enemy soldiers popped the visor to reveal a smooth metallic face on the inside with beady eyes that glared with a red light. The damn thing fixed a look on me and I ducked back down behind the knoll.
“How’s it looking?” Lyric asked.
“What’s the opposite of good?”
She smiled. “I’m not worried at all, Quincy.”
“I’m glad one of us isn’t...”
“Do you know why?” she asked.
“You were dropped on your head when you were a kid?”
She laughed. “Nope. Because I know nothing bad can happen if you’re with us.” She squeezed my arm. “Not only did you kill Damnation Man, but you confronted both of his brothers at the same time and lived to tell about it!”
“And I keep telling you, all of that was luck!”
Liberty shook her head. “Lyric’s right. You’re full of the spirit of the Elementals.”
“I’m full of it alright,” I muttered to myself, turning as—
BOOM!
The bad guys opened fire and the air quickly filled with whizzing bullets, bolts of energy, and explosive rounds that churned the ground and rained debris down on us like shrapnel.
I scrabbled over the knoll at the instant that Splinter brought his bazooka around and opened fire.
I watched the propellant trail from the rocket he fired as it soared into the air and then scythed down onto one of our attackers’ fighting machines.
The fighting machine disintegrated, the turret cast a hundred feet up into the air. Everyone cheered and Splinter fired again and again, and before I knew what was happening, we were all caught up in the middle of the fighting.
Everyone went on the attack, harnessing the power of their feats.
I saw Lyric take down several of the mechanized fighters with sonic bullets, while Liberty carved up a half-dozen more with her swords.
Splinter was unleashing rockets left and right while the Kaptain had whipped out his ludicrously small Hellmouth pistol.
He aimed the pistol and fired.
The tongue of flame that leaped from the tiny barrel was brighter than a supernova.
Whatever projectile came out of the end of the peashooter vaporized five of the mechanized fighting machines.
&nbs
p; “I want one of those!” I shouted.
My smiled faded when I looked over to see a black woman with yellow hair rising over the dust in the distance. She was dressed in what looked like a violet sports bra and tight-ass boy’s shorts. She drifted sinuously, like a snake, flicking her wrists, casting off blobs of orange light that formed into tiny drone-like machines.
My heads-up-display told me what I already knew in my gut.
I was in the presence of the replicating supervillain, the one the Polymath had called Infinity.
26
I dropped into a crouch and summoned up a ball of plasma. The others were screaming at me, but I was so locked down in my “zone,” that I didn’t hear them.
Crawling forward, I waited until the villain had looked the other way and then I centered my targeting reticle over her chest and let her have it.
I thrust out my hand, palm first.
The plasma rocketed forward, slicing through the air like a heat-seeking missile.
The plasma struck Infinity in the chest, obliterating her.
I cheered, thumping my chest.
It was only when I turned to face the others that I realized just how badly I’d fucked up.
“What?” I asked. “Didn’t you see what I just – I just killed the villain and—”
“That was Infinity, numb-nuts,” Splinter said.
“She’s self-replicating,” Liberty added. “Do you know what that means?”
“Kinda sorta, but not really,” I replied, scratching my head.
Splinter pointed. “It means you just made a bad situation a whole lot worse!”
My eyes whipped back and I watched, riveted, as the air seemed to change. Streaking white blurs flew in every direction and the hair on my head stood at attention.
Infinity’s remains, a collection of gory, violet cubes, began thrumming violently and then—
WUNK!
The chunks burst apart, only to quickly reform in cube shapes which multiplied until the ground out beyond was filled with dozens of them.
“Something’s happening,” I said.
“Understatement of all time, Quincy!” the Kaptain shouted.
Two of the violet cubes snapped together.
WHUNK! WHUNK!
More of the violet cubes began violently slamming and locking into each other like those robotic lions in the old “Voltron” TV show. It looked like the cubes had been set on fast-forward, their movements were so rapid.
Like an invisible child with a Lego set, the cubes began stacking, locking, rotating, and compressing. Still others were hovering in the air, humming, glowing, and then racing forward to slam into each other.
The cubes formed two distinct masses that began undulating, starting to divide and during this division, the material separated into rough forms, crude outlines, what I could see were four distinct forms taking shape right before our eyes.
The constructs began unfolding upon themselves, almost as if the insides of the forms were devouring the outside.
The cubes continued to stack and lock together, then pull apart like cheese to expose a flexible inner core, a mesh, a kind of non-organic “flesh” that stretched and coalesced into long strands of what looked like muscle and sinew.
The flesh and musculature fused together to further solidify four additional figures. With ever increasing size and complexity, the forms took on structural detail. First, there appeared what looked like legs, then arms, then a hint of spinal laddering, and finally torsos and heads.
I couldn’t believe my eyes, but I was staring out at four new creations.
Four new Infinity villains.
“Real fucking good, Quincy,” Splinter said.
I gulped. “My bad.”
“Burn the bitches!” Kaptain Khaos yelled. “The only way to stop the replication is to melt them down!”
The Kaptain holstered his Hellmouth pistol and led the way, firing balls of liquified fire from his flamethrower in the direction of the Infinity villains.
I shrank back from the heat, disoriented for several heartbeats.
I’d heard about the “fog of war” before, but there’s nothing that can prepare you for actual combat, particularly when your enemy is superhuman. Screams echoed all around, detonations sounded, and the air was streaked with dust, and tanged with the odor of whatever fuel was inside the Kaptain’s flamethrower.
Liberty and Lyric grabbed my arms, and the three of us entered the fray.
The ladies hooked off to my right and left, taking on two of the Infinity villains as I called up several balls of plasma that I gripped like baseballs.
“Surrender and I promise not to kick your ass!” I shouted at one of the Infinity replicants.
She grinned, her face narrow and ravenous like a wolf.
I was watching her hands, waiting to react to the moment when she formed energy balls, and then she did something unexpected.
She reared back like a horse preparing to gallop, opened her mouth, and shot a stream of energy at me!
The world slowed, and sound dropped out, as everything resolved to a single fucking image.
The stream of pulsing yellow light that the witch was vomiting in my direction.
The energy formed into a fist that socked me in my less than rock hard abs.
I was tossed through the air like a clod of dirt.
Crashing down, I rolled several times and then spotted a pair of huge boots crashing down before me.
It was Infinity herself.
Not only could she make copies of herself, but the bitch had size fourteen feet!
She grabbed my arm and held me up inches from her face. She’d been beautiful once, I could tell that, but time and the elements had stripped her fine features. Her lips pulled back to reveal oversized incisors.
“How would you like me to slurp your marrow?” she hissed.
I grimaced. “I’ll take a pass on that.”
“You’re mine now, little man.”
“That’s fine,” I replied. “But you might want to look behind you.”
She grinned. “I’m not falling for that.”
WHUNK!
Something slammed into Infinity’s back, jolting her, a soul-piercing scream echoing from her mouth.
I looked down to see something jutting through the villain’s chest.
It was the tip of a sword.
Liberty’s sword.
Infinity howled in agony, grabbing the tip of the sword, dropping me to the ground.
For one seething moment, I watched the villain struggling to remove the blade from her upper chest and then I did the only thing there was left to do.
I manufactured two balls of plasma and did something a little different.
Instead of firing the balls at the villain, I smashed them against her body like somebody shattering a champagne bottle against the hull during a ship christening. This had the effect of containing a small cloud of blue-orange flames that smothered her body, and vaporized her before she could replicate.
Whatever was left of her flurried down over the ground as Liberty appeared.
“We did it,” she said.
“We’re a helluva team,” I replied.
She smiled, and we re-entered the field of fire to see that Splinter, Kaptain Khaos, and the others had taken down and incinerated the other Infinity villains, with Lyric tossing her Chernips grenades in every direction to finish them off.
We huddled and then pressed our attack against the remaining enemy forces.
I led the others on a ragged run toward our attackers only to be confronted by two of the fighting machines. Their turrets swiveled and opened fire.
The explosive rounds from their guns detonated a few feet away from me, the force of the explosions knocking me off my feet. I flew sideways, hit the ground and spun a few times, skidding like a hockey puck across the pumice.
There were stars in my eyes, blood in my mouth (I’d bitten my tongue), and my brain was momentarily pain-fogged.
<
br /> Elbowing myself up, I looked down to see a depression in the middle of my singlet. A handful of shrapnel had hit me square in the chest, and if wasn’t for the material, I probably would’ve been a goner.
Grateful to be alive, I cast a look up to see the machines lurching toward me, ready to finish me off.
Rising, I harnessed the pain and the anger. I wasn’t going to let a couple of fucking tin cans show me up in front of the ladies and all the others.
The two machines rose in front of me to their full and terrible height, their engines and pistons shrieking, casting off what sounded like a metallic roar. Steam rose from the turrets as the metal beasts moved laterally, as if trying to size me up.
It was then that I remembered my boots.
The green button on my boots, the very same kind of foot support that I’d seen Madcap and The Showstopper sporting when they were buzzing around over the grotto.
Realizing I had nothing to lose, I pressed the green button and instantly felt incredibly buoyant, like I was standing on an inflatable rib inside one of those kids’ bounce houses.
I literally had a spring in my step, able to cover six, maybe eight feet in a single stride.
The machines fired again, but this time I was too fast for them.
I dodged the incoming rounds and willed myself to conjure up two balls of plasma that suctioned to the palms of my hands.
Picking up speed, I blurred forward and then slid right between the two machines while whipping the balls of energy up at their underbellies.
The energy curled through the air and impacted at the spot where the legs entered the machines’ turrets.
The machines went up in flames, spewing fire, covering a nearby pack of soldier drones
in greasy orange fireballs. The drones began running around erratically, like ambulatory torches, before collapsing to the ground.
I pumped a fist and rejoined the others, staggering over a dune to see Kaptain Khaos spraying bursts of fire from his flamethrower.
Beside him was Lyric, mouth open, unleashing a flurry of sonic bullets that jackhammered five soldier drones, breaking their metallic exoskeletons into pieces.
While this was happening, Liberty swung her swords, hacking off the legs of one of the fighting machines, sending the craft toppling over onto its side. She swooped down onto the stricken machine like a jackal, thrusting her swords into its mechanical innards until it stopped moving. Splinter was nearby, firing his weapons while heaving splinters and corrosive sap at the bad guys.
