To the Power Born: A Tale of the Slayers
Part 14: And the Sentinel Stars….
I woke up the next morning with my head on Daddy's shoulder and Mom spooned up behind me. Gwendolyn lay on Daddy's other side, her head on Daddy's other shoulder, and fortunately for the sake of the high embarrassment potential, everybody had on clothes— even Mom, the perennial nudist. Daddy had on sweatpants, Mom, Gwen and I all running shorts and t-shirts.
"Hey, sweetie," Mom whispered. "Sorry we ain't your usual company, but things felt… really all family-fixated, last night. Colin said he didn't mind, so… we daughter-napped you."
"I don't mind, Mom," I said, squeezing her hand where it rested on Daddy's stomach. "Right now… feels really nice. But… wow, I haven't slept with you guys since I was… ten?"
"Just barely ten, yeah," Mom said. She rolled her hand over and laced her fingers through mine. "That was the night that shithead vampire from Oregon— Arminger, Norman Arminger, that was his name— figured out how to get into the house while most of Team Slayer was out. You did him in good, honey— proud of you for that one still, you saved all the kids— and freaked out pretty good afterwards. No blame on you needin' to sleep with me an' your Daddy that night.
"Last night… we all needed it."
"You got that right," I said, and squeezed her hand again. "Daddy must have been really careful about carrying me, I never woke up at all between Buffy's and here."
"He was," Mom said. "I drove, even, so he'd run a lower risk of wakin' you."
"Neat, thank you," I said. "I'm just gonna lay here a bit— no hurry to get up, is there?"
"None at all."
"Good."
I fell back asleep a couple of minutes later, woke up to Daddy chuckling and trying to smother it.
"What's so funny?" I asked.
"You and Royal," Daddy said, still speaking quietly, but not trying to not laugh anymore. "That's damned cute, honey-girl."
Now that he mentioned it, my shirt was fitting oddly. I moved my eyes to look down— and giggled myself.
I was on my right side, my head on Daddy's shoulder, one hand on his stomach, Mom's hand laced there with mine, Gwendolyn's hand covering both of ours. My shirt, though, was billowed and stretched out, because Royal had climbed inside it from the bottom sometime after I fell asleep the second time, and his head and neck were thrust out of the neck of my shirt, along my neck, and I could feel his slow, regular breath on my earlobe. It must've been cute as hell from outside.
A few seconds later, I found out that I'd get to see it— my sister Belinda came in with a digital camera and took pictures from several angles.
*How is a dragon supposed to get his napping in with all those annoying flashes of light?* Royal sent after Belinda has snapped the last one.
"It's your own fault," I said without sympathy. "You're the one who decided to do the cutesy thing, here."
*It,* Royal sent with careful dignity, *was warm, Jocelyn!*
"Ah, of course," Daddy said. "I swear, your entire breed would side with the bad guys, if they were warmer blooded than us."
*Don't be ridiculous,* Royal sent. *You are warm— but more importantly, you are good. If you were cooler, we probably wouldn't sleep on top of you and nestled to you as much— but still we would join ourselves to you.*
"High praise indeed," Daddy said. "Okay, somebody's going to have to move, ladies— I am feeling a definite pressure about my bladder."
"I'll be movin', then, Whitey," Gwendolyn said. "I'd not disturb that pose with your girl an' her scaly friend for all the mist in Wales."
Gwendolyn got up, kissed Dad, then lay back down after he went to the bathroom. She snuggled up to me— nice, warm and friendly, not sexy (Gwendolyn's an absolute babe, but she's Mom and Dad's girlfriend, so sexual thoughts about her would feel… incestuous), and Royal burbled his approval of another source of warmth, then went back to sleep.
Daddy came back out, went around and kissed Mom good morning, kissed my cheek, and said, "I'm going to start breakfast. Don't laze about too long, or you'll go hungry."
We laid there another ten minutes, then we got up, and I carried Royal, still asleep, inside my shirt— tricky, while walking with a crutch, but I pulled it off, got him out on a chair near the bed in my room without waking him— as I went to my own room to get showered and dressed. Colin was in the shower already, came out just as Mom finished helping me get my foot in a plastic bag so that the elastic-bandage-and-splint arrangement protecting my broken leg wouldn't get wet. He kissed me good morning, said hello, and went downstairs with Nightfall on his shoulder.
The day went mostly quiet. Colin said very little, and I knew it was because he was contemplating telling us what had happened to him at some point that day, as he'd promised. I let him be as quiet as he needed, though it took an effort. After the enforced silence, his quiet kind of made me nervous.
We spent most of the day working on packing up Buffy and Xander's house, preparing them to move to Normal with us— but when we arrived, we found Xander and Buffy working with Joyce, training her in the basics of fighting as a Slayer (she'd had rudimentary martial arts classes for a couple of years now, but it's different when you're a Slayer and can access so much power).
Joyce… I could see that she was working hard, and I felt very glad— if the Scythe, or the Guardians, or whoever, thought she was in danger, then seeing her taking it seriously… yeah. An all-around good thing.
After supper… Colin looked around at all of us, and spoke to Diane. She spoke to Giles, and shortly, Andrew and his Slayers from Europe took all the newbies but Mi Kyong, Autumn and Joyce off to see a play before going to the hotel and bed. Giles spoke to others, and they left, and pretty soon, Giles had reduced things to my family, his family, Vincent, Vi and their girls, Willow, Lydia and little Elise, Angel, Faith and Helena, Uncle Ballard and his family, Buffy, Xander and Joyce, Diane Hodges, and Sara and Chelsea, whom Colin had taken a strong liking to.
"Perhaps… Beth, would you take all those your age and younger inside, please?" Giles said to Vincent and Vi's older daughter. "You may all watch a movie, or play games… but this is going to be the sort of tale that might hurt or upset some of the younger ones, and we'd rather not do that to you."
The younger kids went, grumbling but going, knowing better than to argue. That left Autumn Innes, a week from turning twelve, the youngest person out there, and she had a right to be there by our rules, being a Slayer.
"Thank you, Giles," Colin said. He squeezed me and kissed me chastely, and moved to sit on a picnic table facing the rest of us. "I… it's time to t-tell you all… what I did. What I f-failed to do.
"I… I'm scared. So please, let me just… d-d-do this at my own speed."
"Colin, you don't need to tell us all," Kelly said, almost perfectly in synch with Diane.
"But I do," Colin said. "You all have— have been there. F-for me, I mean. Maybe j-just in l-little ways, but… you've all been there f-for me, tried t-to help.
"I don't know if I'll be able to d-do this m-m-more than once, so… so you all have to hear."
Colin looked down at the ground for a long moment, then lifted his head and said, "I'm sorry. Sorry if… well, if anyone decides n-n-not to stay I w-won't be upset. I… I'd understand."
"Tell us," Angel said. "Tell us, Colin.
"Please."
He did— and I understood his horror when he was through.
Interlude: Another Earth, seventeenth of May 2018
Starpulse soared over the Colorado Rockies on his way back to Chicago from LA, and slowed some as he always did, appreciating the view, even at night. He grinned, thinking back on the expression on the face of the villain who called himself Black Angel when the man had realized that White Mongoose, LA's resident super-speed heroine, had called for backup who could fly. Given that Black Angel could only fly at about a hundred and fifty miles per hour (winged flight— pretty, but never all that fast), and that Starpulse could do something close to a hundred and seventy times that speed… well, the look on the crook's face had been priceless.
He arrived back over Chicago not too long after that, and his eyes went to the tops of several nearby buildings, checking the simple alert system his father had come up with. Starpulse had friends that he trusted to keep him alerted to trouble, and each of them had access to the alert system, which was nothing but mounted twin-spotlights on the top of the dozen or so highest buildings in the Chicago area, each light with several different color bulbs in it that could be lit individually. The first light told Starpulse the level of a threat, the second told him how many people were threatened.
Oh, shit! he thought as his eyes found the closest beacon. Red-yellow, gotta grab the phone!
Red meant that lives were directly and immediately threatened— and yellow indicated a number less than a hundred thousand, but over fifty thousand.
Each of the spotlight sets also had an untraceable cell phone mounted in a weather-proof box below it. Colin went to the nearest box at a speed just below that of sound, and called the number that had called it last, that being the number of whichever of his friends had set off the alert.
"Starpulse, thank god!" said a friendly FBI agent. "Listen, we've got an alien spacecraft about three hundred yards long and half that wide sitting over Homestead-Miami Speedway in Florida, projecting a force field over the place that we can't breach, and they've broadcast over some serious loudspeakers that if you don't get there and hand yourself over to the aliens in the next… hundred and ten minutes, that they'll kill all sixty-odd thousand people in there!"
"Oh, shit— aliens!?" Colin said. "Are you— no, sorry. Call down there, tell the local authorities I'll be there in ten minutes or less."
"Will do, go!"
Starpulse dimmed his glow and flew to the small apartment he rented near his college, and took the usual "serious threat" precautions, setting his computer to email his last will and testament to his mother, then wipe itself clean and melt its own hard drive if he wasn't back in… he decided on twenty-four hours, since he had no idea what he was dealing with.
He gulped down a half a quart of orange juice, then flew out his window, staying dim until he got up to a mile, then letting out the glow of his power and accelerating up hard, letting the sonic boom happen, since his mass wasn't high enough to make it destructive at that height.
In less than the promised ten minutes he landed next to an FBI agent some three hundred yards away from Homestead-Miami Speedway and said, "Okay, what the hell's going on?"
"Thank god you're here," the agent said. "Come with me, sir, I'll take you to SAIC Dixon."
Special Agent In Charge Michael Dixon of the FBI's Miami offices was fifty, small, wiry, and had a force of personality that made even Starpulse, who regularly met and worked with bona fide super heroes, square his shoulders and listen attentively.
"They showed up about twenty-five minutes ago," Dixon said, waving up at the blunted-arrowhead shape of the alien vessel, glittering in moonlight and searchlights. "Just appeared in orbit some thirty thousand miles up, made a transit into close orbit in about two minutes, through the atmosphere and to the place it's sitting now in another five, immediately deployed a force field that's keeping everyone inside. Military jets approached, spouting warnings to clear the airspace— and they shot each and every one of the six fighters down. Instant and total destruction of the planes, pilots never had a chance to eject.
"Next wave fired some serious missiles from a couple of miles off— President's orders, she says that driving this thing off is worth the lives of those who'd be killed."
"Idiot," Starpulse muttered. "She's nuts— blowing up something like this could very well result in taking out, oh, I don't know— Florida!"
"I'll never admit to agreeing with you," Dixon said. "Anyway… they then broadcast that statement about wanting you to come here. And… Starpulse, they then used a sort of a… a beam-thing, and they disintegrated everything in the pit area. Everything. Cars, tools, fuel tankers… and people. Maybe four hundred people."
"Those bastards!" Starpulse said. He shook himself, trying to control a desire to just fly up and see what he could do about blowing a hole in the alien craft. "Why the hell did they— what reason could they have?"
"We've got people in there sending out video via their cell phones," Dixon said. He indicated a laptop computer, pressed a couple of keys. "This is what they sent us after… after the aliens did it."
The screen of the laptop showed that the pit area of the Homestead-Miami Speedway had been blasted down to clean concrete. No blood, no oil stains, no remnant of trash decorated the clean oval of the pit area. All that could be seen besides the concrete was a single rectangular block of some dull metal, about ninety feet long, half that wide, and four feet high. On one end of the rectangle sat a big metal chair, wider and taller than a human could be comfortable in, with a seat that didn't go all the way to the back of the chair, and a back that didn't come but halfway down to seat level.
In the chair sat a creature whose physiology explained the odd construction of the chair; it had been built as it was to allow for the thing's thick, heavy, scaly tail, which lay on the floor of the impromptu stage, twitching slightly. The rest of the creature… well, it seemed to be built along more ape-like lines than reptilian, with knees that bent as a human's did, massive, oddly long arms with an extra elbow-like joint, and a very reptilian face, elongated and muzzle-like, with widely spaced eyes that seemed able to rotate independently, so it could look in two directions at once. The creature had scales over every visible inch of its body, ranging from dark green around the lips and eyes, and the ends of its three fingers and thumb, to an absolutely eye-searing shade of green over the rest of the visible parts of its body. The thing wore only a form-fitting bodysuit that had neither arms nor legs to it, in a metallic-looking orange, and a belt studded with devices and buttons, many of the devices looking to be weapons.
"They beamed the area clear, lowered that platform-stage thing slowly— some sort of magnetic beam, maybe— then lowered the chair the same way. The alien just… beamed in, like something out of a Star Trek show, and sat down." Dixon shook his head. "It's Miami— some folks in the crowd have— had— guns. They shot at him, which, given the range, was pretty damned stupid. Shots hit a secondary force field, apparently invisible, around the platform, did no good. Beams from the ship killed every shooter."
"Miserable— dammit!" Starpulse said. He shook himself, looked at Dixon, said, "What did they say, exactly? About me, I mean?"
Dixon touched a button on the laptop and a vibrating, gravelly voice came from its speakers.
"We require the superior human being Starpulse," the alien voice said. "If the superior human being Starpulse does not give himself to our hands in one hundred and twenty-eight of your species' minutes, all inferior beings in the arena below will be ended. Any further attempt to damage this vessel will result in the immediate ending of all beings within the arena below."
"It repeated that several times, then shut up," Dixon said. "Since then… the ship has just sat there. Same for the alien inside."
"Okay," Starpulse said. "Guess I'd better get in there, then."
A sudden wind sprang up, and a young woman in a white bodysuit and full-head mask complete with goggles stood in front of Starpulse, her hands on her hips, her eyes on his.
"You really don't think you're going in there alone, do you?" White Mongoose asked. "Come on, Starpulse— you know I owe you a couple of times at bat in the backup department."
"What she means is that you're an idiot," said another voice from behind Starpulse, a lightly sarcastic man's voice. "Only Mongoose is too polite to say it. I'm not."
Starpulse started to turn, saw a flicker of shadow behind him, and aborted the movement. In a flash of deep gray shadow, a slender man stood next to White Mongoose, his black and gray loose-fitting fighting costume seeming to cast shadows in too many directions.
"Shadow Dragon, didn't you save my butt, last time we worked together?" Starpulse asked. "So I owe you, not the other way around."
"Yeah, but you're all straightforward and stupid," Shadow Dragon, a teleporting martial artist with power over shadows, said cheerfully. "I'm a sneaky bastich, and I'll do the job right. You know— hit them from behind, teleport away, let them think it was you, let you take the reprisal hit, rinse, repeat."
"Yeah, and while he's doing that, I'll teach Mr. Lizard to play spin-lizard," White Mongoose said. "Sort of like spin-kitty, only on a lizard thing, which— hey, look, snaky! Perfect for me."
"They're right," said a woman's voice from behind Starpulse, a voice that somehow managed to be sultry and singsong at the same time. "This is not an occasion for you to go solo.
"We all go in, Starpulse."
Starpulse sighed, braced himself for the sheer physical impact of the woman who called herself simply "Power," and turned to face her.
Short, not more than five-one, weighed maybe a hundred pounds. Tiny waist, C-cup breasts, beautifully flaring hips, proportionately long legs, a serenely beautiful face that had definite Asian overtones, despite golden-blond hair and blue eyes. Wearing, as usual, only biker's shorts that hugged her lower body delightfully, a sports bra, sneakers and gloves. Somehow, she got by without a mask— apparently, some element of her appearance was artificial, though he had no idea what it might be, and her "normal" appearance different enough that no one connected her secret identity with Power.
Scary to think that such a tiny woman could fling an old diesel train engine into orbit, Starpulse thought, trying not to stare at the tightly toned but still very female body.
"Look, folks," Starpulse said in an even, level voice. "I appreciate the way you all came running— or leaping, or teleporting— I really do. But these aliens are powerful as all get out— and they asked for me. Specifically.
"So what are you going to feel like if you go in there with me… and the aliens start killing people in retaliation?
"I need to go in there alone. You folks need to be ready to stop that damned ship if it goes somewhere else, or attacks the people out here. But you can't go in with me."
"Yeah, whatever," Shadow Dragon said. "Hello? Teleporter, here!"
"And if you teleport in and people die because of it?" Starpulse asked. "What then?"
Uncomfortable silence.
"Yeah," Starpulse said. "It's got to be me— alone."
"Broken skulls but I hate it when you get all noble!" Shadow Dragon muttered. "Did you ever hear of having fun, 'Pulse? I mean, come on! Try it! Fun never killed anybody!"
"You ever taken a good look at my face when I'm flying, Dragon?" Starpulse asked. "Or— remember the night we got those people out of the burning building in the Bronx? You're the one who said if I grinned any wider they'd have to put a hinge on the back of my skull."
"Yeah, I said that— after you pulled the little girl and her damned cat out of there when the place was coming down around your ears." Shadow Dragon shook his head and added in a mournful tone, "I think you have fun being noble. And that's just… wrong!"
"Yeah, but you have fun jumping in front of moving getaway cars and teleporting away just before you get hit," Starpulse said. "So which one of us is crazy?"
"Starpulse," Power said. "Are you certain about going in there alone? There is plenty of time left on the deadline, and I'm sure that others will come. Perhaps Neural could read the aliens' minds, find out if they've got a weakness you could exploit, or— well, if nothing else, you should wait until Heartline gets here, so she can heal you if you're hurt."
"Power, if I wait too long, some hotshot loner like Cyber Knight or Sin-Fire will show up, and then everything will go out of control," Starpulse said. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. "No. No more waiting.
"I'm going in. You folks wait here, try to help the authorities, and for god's sake, don't let Knight or Sin-Fire do anything stupid if they show up. Power… it's not for me to say, but I think you should take charge out here."
"What's she got that I ain't got?" Shadow Dragon asked, waving his arms wildly. "I mean, besides a killer body, all sorts of tactical know-how, the ability to fling tanks at the moon, more patience than your average saint and did I mention a body to die for?"
"Special Agent Dixon, will you work with me on this?" Power asked, ignoring Shadow Dragon completely.
"Of course, Power," Dixon said. "Let me show you what we've got for a perimeter, here."
"A moment, please," Power said. "Starpulse… may I hug you?"
"Uh, sure," Starpulse said. "I'm pretty sure that'll be the high point of my day."
Power hugged him, firm enough to be hard, but not hard enough to cause him any discomfort, and said, "You are a brave man. I only hope this isn't the bad idea it feels like."
"Good or bad, it's the only way to play it," Starpulse said. "Thanks, Power— you give a good hug."
"My turn," White Mongoose said. She hugged him fiercely and said, "Don't do anything stupid— you know, just ask yourself, 'what would Shadow Dragon do?'— then do the opposite."
"For that, madam, I will not tell you the URL of the website that is displaying pictures that it claims are nudes of you," Shadow Dragon said. "So there!"
The teleporting martial artist turned to Starpulse and said, "Look, your nobleness… you can change the color of your power blasts, right?"
"I can, but I have to focus on it," Starpulse said. "Why?"
" 'Cause if you get in over your pointy head, you fire off a big red blast, and I'll teleport your insanely upright and forthwith ass right on out of that place," Shadow Dragon said. "If I don't do that much, at least, Heartline will give me her patented 'you bad boy,' look, and I really don't know if I could take that— not again."
"All right," Starpulse said. He shook the other man's hand, said, "Remember— step on Cyber Knight and Sin-Fire. Threaten them with me, if you have to— Sin-Fire's scared of me, after the last time he and I… talked."
"Was that the time you 'talked' up where the air was so thin he could barely breathe?" Shadow Dragon asked brightly. "Or the time you 'talked' while you were sitting in the water five hundred miles from the nearest piece of land?"
"Neither," Starpulse said. He grinned devilishly and said, "It was the time that we talked while I flew at a mountainside at about mach two, with him dangling by one ankle from my hand. I think he might have gotten the message, finally…."
"Oh, you didn't!" Power said.
"I did," Starpulse said. "He'd just barely missed burning a five year-old boy to death when the kid surprised us while Sin-Fire was interrogating the boy's dad. If I hadn't been there, gotten between boy and blast… yeah. I wouldn't have let Sin hit the rocks— but I was so mad that he couldn't tell that."
"Well… if it worked, I suppose I can't argue," Power said. "Go, Starpulse, before one of the unruly ones show up."
"Good luck," White Mongoose called.
Starpulse flew to the edge of the dome of energy that covered the Homestead-Miami Speedway, right outside the stadium's main entrance.
"My name is Starpulse," he called loudly. "You wanted me— I'm here. Let me in."
A small area of the force field arched up away from the ground, stopping at about eight feet high, and Starpulse stepped through. Immediately, the force field closed behind him, and he started in through the stadium. A hole had been disintegrated from the entrance to the surface of the tracks, so he had a straight walk. As soon as he stepped out onto the track, someone yelled, "It's STARPULSE! I KNEW HE'D COME!"
Cheers and applause broke out all over the stadium, and Starpulse rose into the air some, waved for quiet. Finally, he got it, and he called, "I'm going to do what they want, folks— you get out as soon as they'll let you out, and you be careful— no stampedes, okay?"
The crowd roared again, and Starpulse flew over to the opposite end of the ninety foot rectangle in the middle of the pit area, waited until the secondary force field around it opened, then flew inside, landed, and said, "Okay, you wanted me— you got me. Now let these people go!"
The alien looked at him oddly for a long moment, then said something in a clicking, hissing language. Starpulse opened his mouth to say that he didn't understand— and the words came out in English, sounding loud and grating.
"Just like that, you give yourself to an enemy?" the alien said. "Have you no pride? No courage?"
"You think I'm not proud of the fact that I'll do what you want to save these folks?" Starpulse said. "And courage? Uh, yeah. I'm scared, here— but I'm still here. That's courage, in my book."
"Yours must be a child's book," the alien said, or maybe the alien's translator said. "Courage is fighting."
"Your definition, not mine," Starpulse said. "I'll fight, when I have to. But that's not courage."
"So… you will fight when you have to," the alien said. "So good… then you will have to.
"Fight me, Superior Human Being Starpulse— or I will kill everyone here. Regardless of who wins, I will release them."
"You said you'd let them go if I came," Starpulse said. "I'm here. Let them go."
"You did not listen," the alien said. "No thing like that was said. What was said was that if you did not come the inferior humans would be killed. Nothing was said about releasing them if you did come."
"Listen to me, you scaly son of a diseased alligator," Starpulse said, his voice low and tight. "If you don't let them go, you die. I don't like killing, but I will. To save all these people, I will!"
"You do not like killing," the alien said. It spread both hands out, palms down. "You are sad. To not like killing is to not like living.
"I am Skradal Kratsaa. I command the vessel above you. I command the mission to take you to my world. I challenge you. You fight me, Superior Human Being Starpulse. You defeat me, I let the inferior humans go and let you go. I defeat you, you come to my planet without difficulty, swear to not ever try to leave— and still I let the inferior human beings go."
"Define 'defeat,' Skradal Kratsaa," Starpulse said, struggling with the alien name, but not doing badly. "And stop with the 'Superior Human Being Starpulse' bit. Just Starpulse."
"Defeat, Starpulse, comes when either of us falls to the platform or the ground and cannot rise again in… two hands of your second-time-units. Two proper hands." It held up its own hands as example. "Or when you kill me, if you will grow the courage to do as you should."
"Any rules?" Starpulse asked.
"You have weapons of your body, your… powers," Skradal said. "So I will use the weapons of my people. Past that… only hatchlings pull tails."
"Okay, no tail-pulling," Starpulse said. "I don't have a tail— so you don't pull my hair— this stuff." He ran a hand over his hair and flipped his ponytail. "Agreed?"
"Agreed." Skradal stood— standing, he was over seven feet tall— and took a slender double-cylinder connected by a band that looked to fit over his lower arm, and fitted it over his left arm. He then took a slender metallic cord in his right and said, "Prepare.
"Begin!"
Starpulse activated his force field, took the first hit from the alien's double-cylindered beam weapon on his chest— and felt nothing but a very mild increase in heat. Skradal looked worried, and snarled something in his own language that wasn't translated. Either there was no equivalent, or the translator had been shut off.
Starpulse started walking forward as the alien fired his double-barreled weapon repeatedly, taking hits on chest, stomach, face, even groin— and he felt nothing but a mild, even pleasant, heat from the hits.
As he got within thirty feet or so of the alien, still strolling casually, Starpulse raised his right hand and fired a single blast at the alien. Apparently, Skradal had a personal force field of his own— but it wasn't as good as Starpulse's field. The beam hit it square in the chest, and the reptilian alien flew backwards, slammed into the wall of the force field that surrounded the stage, rebounded, and staggered towards Starpulse, shaking its head and hissing in fury.
"Okay, this is going to be less of a challenge than I thought," Starpulse said. "So, Skradal— if you surrender, I'll accept it. I'll even let you take your ship and get out of here, so long as you don't hurt anyone else."
"No surrender!" Skradal said, and this time it was translated. Apparently, the alien's profanity didn't translate well, but everything else did okay. "Fight me! Fight back!"
"Okay." This time, Starpulse fired a beam at half power— the first one had been about ten percent of normal power, the sort of thing he'd use on a slightly augmented human. This time, he went for a shot that would take out most of the super-strong villains and heroes who didn't have any more toughness than that required to keep them from tearing themselves apart with their own strength.
Skradal slammed into the chair he'd been sitting in, bent the whole thing horribly out of shape when he and it slammed into the force field wall. It staggered to its feet, shook its head again, and started swinging the slender cord in its right hand, paying out the metallic line as it advanced until it swung all thirty feet or so of cord around its head surprisingly quickly. Skradal lunged forward suddenly, still swinging, and the cord wrapped twice around Starpulse's upper arms, pinning them to his sides, but leaving his lower arms free.
Skradal hiss-roared in triumph— then shrieked as Starpulse simply flew backwards at a hundred miles an hour or so and slammed into the back wall of the force field around the platform. The alien hit a few feet to Starpulse's left, face first, and staggered back, dropping the cord. Starpulse grabbed the cord where it had melded together on his chest, and melted it with a medium-power blast.
"Okay, give up?" Starpulse asked. "I mean, I haven't even gone past half-power blasts, yet."
Skradal hiss-howled and leaped at Starpulse, long, over-jointed arms swinging, clawed fingers slashing, open hands slapping. The impacts got loud— but Starpulse felt nothing at all.
"Okay, this is past old and into stupid," Starpulse said. "Fight's over."
"Not over!" Skradal hissed, still swinging. "Still fi— AAAAAHHHH!"
Starpulse fired twin power blasts— full power, but concussive only, not burning— into the alien's legs, halfway between hip and knee. Both legs broke, one popping the bone out through muscle and hide, and the creature fell to the metal platform.
"Okay, we're done," Starpulse said. "We both know you aren't getting up from that in eight seconds.
"Let these people go."
"You… are powerful," Skradal said. "And… stupid.
"Would you keep your word to a… a blind, stupid animal that writhes in mud?
"You are so stupid you might. But I do not keep my word to any not my race."
Starpulse raised both hands, fired a twin blast at the most power he could put out, practically obliterated the alien's body— but to no avail.
The alien must have given a signal, or… something. Starpulse didn't realize what was happening until the first person screamed.
The secondary force field, the one around the platform in the pit area, was expanding outward towards the primary one around the whole raceway— rapidly. And the people were caught between the two… and all of the wood, metal and concrete of the stands that was being carried along by the expanding inner force field.
"NO!" Starpulse screamed. "NO! NO!"
He blasted full power at the force field, tried to break through to the alien spacecraft— but the field showed no effect at all from his blasts. He tried a lower place, near the ground, thinking that if he could make a hole, any hole, anywhere, the field might collapse, or at least weaken.
Starpulse poured all the power he could into the alien force field— but nothing changed. Nothing stopped the ever-expanding inner field. He blasted away, trying to drown out the screams of the people who were being crushed, crushed into each other, the rubble of the stands, the force field— but that many people, screaming their last, he could not drown out.
Finally, the screams, the snapping of bones, the horrible glopping sound of popping human bodies, and the crunch of rubble stopped— and Starpulse looked around to see a dome of a horrible, hideous red all around him.
Then the internal force field vanished— and the red rain fell on him, covered his force field in the crushed red paste of more than sixty thousand people.
Starpulse— Colin Goddard, he never wanted to be Starpulse again!— snapped.
Something inside him pushed at the white-gold ball of energy that was his power, pushed the door of that power open farther than he'd ever opened it before— and Colin Goddard flared as brightly as a star brought to earth, destroying every drop of pulverized human being that was inside the alien force field, burning away a huge, round pit in the racetrack and the ground beneath it.
Half mad with grief and guilt, he looked up at the alien ship above him— and did something he'd never dared to do before.
Colin Goddard maximized his force field, then surrounded it with the energy he used to burn things away, making him a missile of impossible, deadly heat. That, he'd done before.
Then he accelerated straight at the center of the alien vessel, went from floating still in the air to moving at slightly in excess of twenty-seven thousand miles an hour in the space of a hundredth of a second. That… he'd never done that before, never been angry enough to need to do that.
He barely felt the impact— and he bored through the alien ship like a power drill through pudding.
He stopped some ten miles up— a flicker of movement, that was all he perceived— and flew back down even as the alien vessel, crackling with unknown energies, rocking from small explosions all through it… dropped into the pit he'd burned away.
He screamed, screamed so loud that he felt blood trickling down his throat, started to fly down to destroy any alien that might live through the crash—
— and something grabbed hold of him, froze him in place, twisted him through spaces and places he'd never imagined—
— then dropped him in a basement full of monsters, monsters attacking a beautiful girl.