Attn. Violence ahead.
21 Into the Fray
Muscle memory takes over as Jan positions himself behind the open cruiser door, gun in his hands, forearms braced on the door frame. On the outside he looks competent and professional, but inside his stomach is churning, his head spewing out pointless thoughts like this can't be real and I really shoulda read more comics as a kid.
In front of him, a creature of shadow stands with its arms raised, laughing as monsters rise up out of the earth.
21.1 Man Overboard Drill
Maria watched as Francis sped down the street, on his way to save the city.
It was things like this why Maria was in love with him. He was loyal, capable and strong. He knew his own strengths and weaknesses and those of the people around him, even if they didn't know it themselves. Time and again he had pushed her to achieve things she wouldn't have expected of herself and she had become stronger for it. Graduating high school, finding a legit job, coming to terms with her new modo de ser. That, and he was nice to look at.
So when he casually asked her to save the life of the boy who would cure the city, she responded in kind, confident she could do it.
Maria spread herself thin across the lake, searching for Gear. It was tough to think or act when she let herself get big and diffuse, but it was quicker than staying condensed and running back and forth across the lake. The smaller, the more confined she made herself, the more her strength grew, but she couldn't see or hear or reach as far.
She found Gear out towards the middle of the lake, maybe a kilometer or so from the marina, trying to scoop water out of a small boat with a crack on one side. He looked cold and tired, like he'd been at this for a while.
Maria pulled herself together, made a vessel out of lake water she could talk to Gear with.
"Let's go to the shore, okay?"
Gear jumped—it was dark and he hadn't seen her. "Maria?"
"Yeah. Hold the boat. I'll pull you."
He grunted and nodded and Maria walked her vessel over to the boat, lifted it up onto her "shoulders". She had to make herself fairly small to be able to lift so much mass, but Gear kept his eyes on the shore and all she had to do was go in a straight line where he was looking.
She took him back to the boat and gave him a towel, turning her "back" while he took off his wet clothes, even though she was sure he knew that what she could see had nothing to do with the direction her vessel was facing.
Gear handed her the wet things and Maria pulled the water out of them and gave them back.
"I didn't know you could do that," Gear said as he put on the dry clothes.
"It's not so hard. The water slides out."
"You're gonna have to tell me more about how your power works," he said, nerdy enthusiasm shining through. Francis thought he was obnoxious, but Maria thought his enthusiasm was sweet, if misplaced.
"Yes, not now. I'm going to make sure Francis is okay. Do you want to come or I can leave you here?"
"I'll come. I dunno if I'll be any help, but I'll come."
Maria smiled and nodded. "That's good. Did you ever see that movie with the boy who finds the extraterrestre and they ride a bike?"
Gear scrunched his eyebrows. "ET?"
"That's how we're going to get there."
A couple minutes later Maria had left her vessel behind and was dragging the neighbor's bicycle down the street, Gear peddling madly. It wasn't quite like the movie because they weren't flying, at least not much, and Gear was quiet, not screaming like he was on a roller coaster.
The two of them screeched to a stop in the parking lot outside the lab. Maria abandoned the bicycle to observe the scene. It was chaos. The police huddled together around their cars and each other, weathering acid and ice and rays of fire, trying to shoot at the bang babies who had them so trapped.
"Can you stop them?" Gear asked, waving at the battle.
Maria pulled some water out of the ground for a vessel. "I can try."
Gear gave her a salute and Maria strode into the fray. The police were trying to hold a line across the parking lot and the grass, preventing the bang babies from leaving the lab building and getting into the offices. Maria couldn't really see the office building from here, or the road—they were too far away—but that didn't matter. She knew where they were and what the police were trying to do: contain the attackers.
Francis had already lured the ice girl off to one side and they were in a contest of who could use their power more. The air had turned to steam around them, the ground to mud.
Maria turned her attention to the big, soft creature that was spewing acid at the police's shields. The thing had once been a man, but now it was a monster, like an amoeba grown gigantic with the thought of becoming human. It had organs and bones and eyes and brains floating inside it like vegetables in a soup.
She closed in on it, tried to lift it up, but it was too heavy. Mouths without teeth opened up along its body, vomiting corrosive stuff at Maria's vessel. She caught it and threw the resulting sphere back at the monster's head.
The thing lunged at her vessel and Maria slid around it. Killing it would be easy. All she had to do was reach inside and pull out something important. Its brain or its heart. But did the thing deserve to die? It was ugly and terrifying and dangerous, but it had to remember what it once had been, had to have some level of reason.
"Stop or I kill you!"
The thing spun to face her vessel, shoulders shaking, mitten hands holding its belly. It was laughing. It pointed one stubby finger at her, then at itself and laughed again.
It did have powers of reason. She almost wished it didn't, so that if she had to kill it, at least she wouldn't feel bad about it.
More acid splashed harmlessly onto her vessel and Maria retaliated, reaching inside the monster and pulling a piece of it out through one of its thousand mouths. Some kind of organ, huge and wet and corrosive, splattered on the ground.
The monster burbled, leaking acid and swinging its fists at her vessel. Maria grabbed a policeman's shield and rammed it lengthwise into the creature's belly. She pulled it out again, the hard clear plastic dripping like honey where the acid ate it.
"Go or I chop you to pieces!"
Despite the pain it must have been in, the monster lunged at her again. Before it had taken so much as a step the policemen fired their guns, bullets exploding like water drops on the monster's back.
The step turned into a fall and the monster burst open on impact. Maria edged away, disgusted. Forgotten, the shield dropped to the ground.
And then another bang baby, this one huge and scaly, bowled through her, colliding with the nearest huddle of police. Maria reformed her vessel and banished any thoughts she might have of remorse or disgust over what had happened to the acid monster. Right now she had to protect the people who were trying to protect the city.
21.2 Quick Thinking
Richie watched as Maria flew into the battle, screaming at the green jello man. She was so seriously OP compared to everyone else he was more worried for Ebon's new recruits than for Francis's girlfriend.
There were some real heavy hitters out there though and Richie's power only left him slightly better equipped than the average fifteen year old. He hopped back on the bike and pedaled away from the battle.
In the little of it he'd seen, it looked more like a distraction, a ploy for time more than anything else. Those guys could have wiped the floor with the police by now if they had wanted, but instead they were playing cat and mouse, only taking it seriously after Francis and Maria had arrived on the scene.
If the attackers were stalling for time, that had to mean Ebon was working on something, presumably something to do with the gas down in the secret lab. That was what Richie had to deal with.
Both the main entrance by the street and the side entrance by the parking lot were blocked off by the fighting, but there were a couple back doors he might be able to slip through. These would be locked on the outside though, so rather than poking around the back of the labs, Richie peddled over to the office building, snagged an elevator and let himself into Alva's office.
He paused for a second, wondering where Ebon had sent Virgil and Alva and if they were okay, then shook his head. Virgil was tough, he'd be fine, and Alva could die in a black hole for all Richie cared about him. He was a reckless jerk, even if he did make some pretty neat stuff.
Richie plopped himself in Alva's sleek white desk chair and booted up the computer. New track: What kind of password does Alva use on his office desktop? Highest priority.
While the computer ran through its boot up sequence, Richie dedicated all of his own processing power to figuring out the problem. The newly created track dredged through all of Richie's knowledge, memories and assumptions about Alva, his life and his company.
A couple minutes later the computer rang out a warm, welcoming tone and Richie snapped out of his stupor. He wiped a trickle of blood from under his nose and entered his first guess. He waited with baited breath, and... Hole in one. Colors swirled on the screen and the desktop appeared with an overhead shot of the lake as the background.
Richie sat up straight, put his hands on the home row and dove into the Alva Industries private network. It wasn't long before he had control over all the automated systems in the complex. It was a good thing Alva was so tech savvy and had access to everything because otherwise Richie's job would have been a heck of a lot harder.
A window in the bottom corner of the screen showed the footage from the security cameras around the site, flashing in quick succession. As fast as his fingers would let him, Richie requisitioned Alva's fleet of security drones to get a better view of what was going on below and to search for Ebon and Static. Robots snapped to life at his command, though those were of little use. The ones not rooted in place were mainly butler-bots, fragile things designed to do dishes, organize schedules and take phone messages.
But they could talk.
Richie pulled up a new window and started issuing commands. The half dozen butlers under his control began making phone calls as Richie watched the fight, figuring out the weaknesses of Ebon's new crew. Maria had the green jello man under wraps, and Francis was in deadlock with the ice girl, even if they were doing a lot of collateral damage.
The lumpy guy making the clones was actually hiding behind the entrance to the labs, a decoy clone giving orders and pretending to be the original, drawing fire. Once Richie told the cops where to find the true original, he would be easy to take down.
The speedster with blades growing from his arms had to stop and catch his breath after every dash, if only for a second. After a little observation, Richie would be able to predict when and where he would have to stop.
The weird, weaselly creature had the power to take control of someone else's body after touching them, though it looked like his captives could break free with a strong enough effort of will. This just meant that he had to be separated from his counterpart, a woman with sack-like folds of loose skin dangling from her body. Judging by the facial expressions of the people around her, she was influencing their emotions, making them fearful and apathetic, or brave and confident, depending on the side. No wonder the cops were faring so badly.
And as for the man with the steel cables extruding from his back-
Richie blinked and navigated back to the feed from that specific drone to see Steel Cables loading something into an airplane. Where the heck had Ebon gotten an airplane?
"Oh, no," Richie said in horror as he recognized it as a crop duster. "No, no, no..." Ebon was going to spray the city.
He punched in the last few commands for the butlers and took off back down the stairs. The elevator was too slow, the butlers were too slow, even his own feet were too slow.
Focus, think! He told himself as he ran. How long did he have before Ebon and Steel Cables took off? How could he stop the plane without letting the gas out? Running down there and trying to confront them himself was just about the stupidest thing he could do.
But that's what he was doing. He couldn't risk running to the police—they were in the middle of a battlefield. He slapped his head as he jumped down the last couple steps and got out his shockvox, selected a frequency.
"This is Gear. Does anybody copy? Police, do you copy?" he panted into the radio, pausing to plan the best route to the airplane. It was sitting in a parking lot a block or so away under darkened street lights, unnoticed thanks to the chaos going on around the labs.
The 'vox crackled in his hand with the desperate chatter between the officers and the intel being relayed out by the butlers. He continued trying to contact them as he ran, climbing over a fence between the Alva property and the next set of office buildings and skidding down a gravel embankment. He ran through parking lots and squishy, over-watered grass, coming to a stop at the corner of an insurance management firm.
Richie grimaced, wishing he still had Backpack and his helmet. He felt blind without the constant streams of information the robot gave him. He really needed to make a more durable model, the way the things kept breaking. At least this time he'd backed up Backpack's brain on a set of CDs, so he wouldn't have to reprogram the whole thing.
Delete new robot design tracks. He had to stay focused. He closed his eyes and listened, trying to figure out what Steel Cables and his possible colleagues were doing. Were they still loading the plane? He had to delay them. The longer he held them back, the more likely it was someone else would come find the plane.
Richie looked around, then jogged along the side of the building, towards the plane, until he found a window he could reach. He created a track that blotted out physical pain and smashed his fist and the sharp corner of the shockvox through the glass.
Shards cut his skin but he didn't feel it yet, at least not consciously. Glass crashed around him, falling onto the ground and into the room beyond. He knocked away the shards covering the ledge, glancing in the direction of the lot that held the plane. A shadow appeared at the corner of the building, writhing metal tentacles glinting in the moonlight.
A tentacle whipped after him, but Richie was already hauling himself in through the window. The man shouted at him as he ran through the open plan office space, squinting in the darkness. There, not too far from the glowing red exit sign, was the thing he was looking for. Fire alarm.
He yanked on it with bloodied fingers. Lights flashed and alarms screamed, turning the empty office into a rave. That would bring some attention.
Richie turned to run, but something cold and hard grabbed his foot. He fell and was dragged backwards, head and back scraped against the carpet, and then he was lifted up into the air. Steel coils wrapped around him, uncomfortably tight.
He writhed, trying to shout, and then blackness took him.
It wasn't that he had passed out, but rather that Ebon had portaled him and the tentacled man out of the office building and into somewhere darker and quieter. They were outside again, within sight of the broken window. Gunfire popped in the distance.
"Boss?" Richie's captor grunted.
"Get back to work, Chainlink. I'll deal with this one."
Richie was traded from one monster to another, not sure if he had just gone from the frying pan to the fire or someplace even worse. Ebon held him in one massive hand, crushing him just as Chainlink had.
"Hello, Gear," Ebon said, creating a chair out of darkness and sitting on it. A similar chair appeared underneath Richie and he was forced into a seated position, still wrapped head to toe in Ebon's grip. Richie wrinkled his nose. The chairs and the bonds were all part of Ebon's body, props made of flesh. As Ebon did this, a portal popped into existence next to him and he thrust a tendril of darkness into it. Bit by bit the sound of fire alarms went quiet.
Alarms extinguished, Ebon returned his attention to Richie. "Some peace and quiet. Good. I don't think we've ever had the chance to talk."
The wraps around Richie's head slid away, but the rest of him was still immobile, trapped in Ebon's supernaturally strong clutches. "I dunno why not when you had me locked up for ten hours, like, just last week," Richie said. It had actually been nine hours and forty-five minutes, and a little more than a week ago, but Richie was rounding.
"You know, I'm still not sure about you," Ebon said, not responding to Richie's attempt at being snarky. "Fade thinks you're one of us, all this garbage about tracks and inventing things."
Richie went cold. How did Ebon know about that? How his power worked was extremely private information. His brain flashed through a list of all known bang babies, trying to match up one of them with Ebon's "Fade." The invisible guy. The one Adam had fought. Had he been spying on him the whole time? How had he avoided detection?
Richie pushed that thought aside, pushed his fear aside as Ebon continued.
"So I'm giving you this chance. Prove it to me you're something special. Prove it to me you're not just human and I'll let you live." There was a hint of a smile in Ebon's voice. He was like a cat, torturing a bird just for the fun of it.
Richie didn't know how to do what Ebon asked. His power wasn't like Virgil's or Francis's or even Maria's, it was more subtle. But even as he searched for a way to prove himself, he realized something else.
"That's why you didn't just kill Virgil after you escaped. You think that 'cause he's a bang baby he gets a pass? Like he's better than everybody else?"
Ebon's masklike face remained unchanged, but his tone was harder when he spoke, less pretending to be friendly. "He is better. He is the child of iron and lightning."
"His powers don't make him better than other people," Richie said. It was his morals that did that.
Ebon smiled, a mouth appearing on an otherwise featureless face, created to make Richie uncomfortable. "So you think I should have killed your friend?"
"No, I-"
Ebon interrupted him. "Static has a place in the world to come. He has the right to rule and he knows it, even if he denies it and fights for the wrong side. Would he have fought me if he didn't have the power?"
Richie remained silent. It was true, neither he nor Virgil would have gone vigilante if they didn't have their powers, and what right, really, did they have to do that? None whatsoever. Powers didn't put them above the law and common sense.
But to Ebon, having powers meant the right or even the duty to use them. Although, Richie thought, what was power really but the ability to control the world and the people around you? You didn't need super strength if you had buckets of money and charisma. If Ebon had won the lottery instead of getting superpowers he probably would have hired a bunch of armed goons and done pretty much the same thing as he'd done in real life.
"Where's Talon?" Richie asked. It was semi-rhetorical. He knew she was in prison, that she had chosen to stay there to be protected from her one time gang leader.
Ebon's creepy smile melted back into flat smoothness. Richie held back a smile of his own. He'd touched a nerve.
"Corrupted," Ebon said with distaste, "by frightened humans trying to keep the status quo. That'll change once the balance is tipped in my favor." He pulled Richie in closer. "But you still haven't proved your worth. Why shouldn't I kill you for your meddling?"
Richie stared Ebon down. He'd seen the stuff Richie could make—wasn't that proof enough? No normal fifteen year old kid could really build rocket skates or a functional AI, no matter his resources.
"So expose me," Richie heard himself say. "Then I'll definitely be one of you." It was a flaw in Ebon's logic and Richie's mouth had decided to exploit it before his brain could run a simulation of the consequences. With exposure to the gas, every human had the potential of becoming metahuman. By Ebon's metric, he shouldn't kill any humans because they all had the possibility of becoming what he wanted them to be.
"No, I don't think so," Ebon said. "The gas gets to choose who joins my ranks and who dies when the time comes, but it's up to me to decide who will have that chance."
Richie shivered. How many out of those exposed had died? Lots, he was pretty sure. Maybe a third or half at the big bang?
"My proof?" Ebon asked in a low voice. He sounded like his patience was wearing thin.
"I can do math," Richie tried. "I bet there's a calculator in-"
"No. Any human can learn to do arithmetic in their head."
A siren blared in the distance as a fire truck approached. Ebon looked up, then created a new portal, sending another questing tentacle into it. A couple moments later, a distant alarm sounded, coming from a different office building further down the street. The firefighters would go there instead.
Ebon's coils twisted, impatient, and Richie had to use his power to force himself to be calm, not start panicking. He was running out of time, but what could he do? Ebon wasn't going to let him have the tools he needed to build something. But what else could he do with his power?
"I can draw..." Really, all of his hand-eye coordination was way better than it had been, but that was moot if Ebon kept him immobile.
"One more chance," Ebon said, face featureless and expressionless.
Richie clenched his fists, still pinned to his sides by Ebon's bulk, sweaty and wet. He blinked. No, it wasn't sweat, it was blood. He'd forgotten something, or at least overlooked it.
"I can turn off pain."
Ebon created eyebrows and raised them. "Now that's interesting," Ebon said, his voice barely a whisper. He formed a portal and retrieved something from it, something bulky and colored like a yellow jacket, stainless steel reflecting dully in the dim light. A cord-free circular saw. He gave the power button a push and the saw growled.
Richie panicked. He thrashed against Ebon's grip, crying for help. Ebon wrapped him tighter, forced his mouth shut.
"Sit still, boy, and you won't get hurt. Presumably. But if you scream, you die."
Richie bit his lip in fear, tears streaming as he checked and checked again with the Administrator, making sure his senses of pain and pressure were totally muted. He tasted blood in his mouth as he bit too hard on his lip, unable to tell how hard was too hard. He felt disoriented, like his body wasn't really his own.
The saw growled again, then its tone changed as it tore into the flesh on his upper arm. Blood filled the air and Richie looked away but he didn't scream. He didn't feel it as the saw bit into bone, but the sound changed again, the growl turning into a whine.
And then he did feel something. A blast of heat to the back of his head, so warm it should have hurt.
Ebon dropped him and Richie fell to the ground, unable to clear his head or consciously understand what was going on. It was taking all his processing power to blot out the pain and keep from going into shock.
Some kind of fight was going on, leaving Ebon distracted.
He pushed himself to his feet, his right arm dangling by a thread, useless. With the last of his strength, he climbed in through the broken window again to hide from the fight and staunch the bleeding.
Some office worker had left a cardigan hanging from the back of her chair and Richie wrapped up his arm in that, then slumped on the ground, leaning against a desk. He checked his pocket for his shockvox, but it wasn't there. He must have dropped it. A phone?
He reached up to the desk above him, groping for the office phone he'd seen there. His numb fingers bumped into something and he yanked it down. The phone clattered to the ground and Richie dialed 9-1-1.
"Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?" the operator asked immediately.
"Bleeding," Richie said, his voice distant in his ears. "Arm. 'M in a insurance place. By Alva labs."
He closed his eyes as the operator asked him questions. He wanted to answer, but he just couldn't seem to understand what it was she wanted to know.
"Sir, stay with me sir. What's your name?"
Richie thought about it, not sure what to say.
Author's note:
So... violence. Will Richie be okay? x_x
Bilingual bonus:
modo de ser = way of existing/mode of existence
extraterrestre = alien
I hope Maria's section turned out readable. Hers wasn't the easiest POV to write.