Making Supers 1, page 11
A mass of shadows crept up beside the other guards, who had their eyes and guns fixed on me like a magnet. The advancing guard stopped just out of arm’s reach, leveled his gun at my skull, and glared at me.
“I’m not going to ask again, motherfucker,” he snarled. “Get the fuck down onto your knees, or I’ll ventilate you right here and now.”
“Not gonna read me my rights first?”
“I’m not a cop, shithead. Knees, now!”
I bowed my head, as if his words actually intimidated me, and started to slowly sink into a crouch. He kept his eyes glued on my face, just as Giselle melted out of the darkness.
She appeared on the concrete ramp behind the first guy, slammed a kick up into his balls, and drove her stun-gun into the second guy’s neck. Howls of pain exploded as they toppled over, and my would-be captor couldn’t help himself.
He looked over his shoulder to see what the hell was happening.
I crossed the space between us with a lunge, bobbed out of the way of the pistol, and smashed a low roundhouse into the guy’s leg. I caught hold of his gun hand and yanked him further off-balance, smashed him into the asphalt, and disarmed him with a deft twist of my hands.
My fingers slid instinctively around the gun, and the guard tried to scramble to his feet to keep the fight going. I smashed a kick into his face before he could get his feet under him, and swept the loading zone for any other guards.
Nothing. Although it wouldn’t be long before the alarms went off.
I bent over the guard, checked that he was out cold, and then tore out his earpiece. I slid it up under the mask, into my free ear, and sprinted toward the raised ramp near the entrance to the warehouse. I clicked on the safety of my stolen gun, slid it into the back of my pants, and vaulted up to join Giselle.
She’d already scrambled both of the guards with a couple thousands volts each, and she offered me a gun butt-first as I arrived. Her teeth flashed through her mask with a grin as I checked the chamber, and nodded my approval.
We ghosted into the Outreach Center together.
It was no homeless shelter, that was for sure.
Catwalks lined the walls, ten feet up off the ground, and steel stairs snaked up to meet them at four critical points. Huge shipping containers were laid out throughout the warehouse in a maze-like pattern, which made sight lines tricky. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead, bathed the entire space in a weird yellowish gloom, but blue light shone up from seemingly random sections behind the containers ahead of us. The unmistakable smell of ozone and crackle of electricity filled the air.
I scanned the catwalks and spotted patrolling guards above. They carried carbines, not pistols, and stood decked out in tactical gear. I counted out eight of them, armed to the teeth with the best gear that money could buy.
Suddenly the guys outside seemed like small-timers.
I spoke as quietly as I could manage to Giselle. “Guards up above need to go. Keep your eyes open for the supe. And don’t pull your punches.”
“Roger,” Giselle replied, just as softly.
The all-but-invisible Giselle slipped deeper into the warehouse and vanished into the shadows of the containers around us. Her Shadow-Stealth skill concealed the sound of her footsteps.
I crept forward as sneakily as I could. A burst of static echoed through my ear, and I heard a panting voice broadcast through the guard’s channels.
“Breach, breach! Two trespassers, heavily armed, masks!”
“Where?” demanded one of the guys above us.
“They came in through the loading ramp. Armed and dangerous. And… I think they might be superpowered, sir.”
A cold, clinical tone came online over the comms. “What?”
“We didn’t see one of them until she was on top of us, sir.”
I slid past one of the containers, making sure to stay focused on the conversation. Any intel I could wrangle out of these guys would give Giselle and me an edge against them.
The cold voice had to be the leader, and ten bucks said it was Scourge. The guy’s voice reminded me of smiling serial killers in documentaries, and the sheer lack of humanity in his tone would have given me the heebie-jeebies if I hadn’t already run across Darkstalker and Bullrush.
“That just makes you incompetent,” the cold voice said.
“Shall we call for backup, sir?” the guard outside asked.
“Did you hear me ask for it?” Mr Psycho-Voice replied.
“N-no, sir.”
The clatter of boots on steel steps froze me in my tracks.
One of the guards had descended down from the catwalks above. It was a miracle that they hadn’t already spotted me, but I put that down to the outfit I wore. Pure black could stand out in low light, in some cases. But the dark gray of my clothes made me virtually indistinguishable from the containers and the concrete, unless you looked really close.
I slowed my breathing as the patrolling guard stalked into my sightline. He had his rifle ready, braced up to his shoulder. He scanned efficiently for threats through a pair of tactical goggles as he swept his head left and right.
I needed to neutralize him, and fast.
And I couldn’t afford to use the kid gloves, either.
Chapter 15
I turned and sprang at the guard’s unprotected back. He caught the movement a second too late. I slammed a hand over his mouth, snaked a blood choke around his neck, and hauled him into the shadows under the catwalk.
The guy was in shape, and he had training. He tried to plant his feet and get his center of gravity back under him, but I just tightened my choke and kicked out his leg again. Strangled grunts slipped out from behind my hand, muffled by the weird hum in the air of the warehouse.
A couple of seconds later, he was out like a light. I held the choke for another seven seconds, just to make sure the guy was out for the count, and left his body under the catwalk.
I unslung his rifle from his shoulder, and a red light flared next to the fire-selector. I frowned at it, noticing pads around the weapon’s pistol-grip. I’d heard of finger-print coding for weapons before, but in the places I’d trained, it was prohibitively expensive. Pinnacle didn’t seem to have a lack of money, though, and I muttered a silent curse. A rifle would have been a direct upgrade to my stolen handguns.
I’d just have to improvise.
“1-B, what’s your status?” another merc asked.
I ignored the question and made my way into the maze of steel in the center of the warehouse. I was on a timer, and I needed to know where the hell the weird buzzing was coming from.
Unease slipped through the guards’ voices as they tried to contact their fallen comrade. I rounded the corner of a shipping container and found the source of the electric hum.
A wide, foot-high platform stretched out in front of me. Smaller containers, machinery, and screens clustered around the base of the machine, but it was the source of the power that rooted me to the spot.
A naked guy hung suspended in the air above the platform. Manacles encircled his wrists and ankles, and he looked like he was lying flat on his back on an invisible table. Arctic lightning boiled through his veins. Glowing blue energy rippled out of his fingertips in sparks of lightning, and the humming platform below him drank in the electricity.
Barrel-like batteries stood in a bank at the side of the machine, and blue progress bars slowly ticked up as the structure drank in power from the motionless guy above.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
The lightning from the naked guy had to be some kind of superpower, but Pinnacle’s schtick was to field their own heroes to fight against the nebulous threat of supervillains.
The machine had to be designed to fill the batteries from the prisoner’s latent energy. That was the source of the Outreach Center’s power—they were piping batteries full of juice from supes, then shipping them out to Pinnacle’s other buildings. Batteries would ensure that Pinnacle wasn’t beholden to the city’s power grid.
We weren’t attacking a central pillar of Pinnacle’s operation—this place was designed to be a fucking contingency.
Giselle’s voice, low and edged with adrenaline, came through the comms.
“Dean? What’s going on?”
“Found out how they get their power,” I whispered back. “I’m going to start wrecking their operation. Start with the guards up on the catwalks. Any sign of Scourge, let me know.”
“Understood,” Giselle murmured back.
I crept over to the control panel, found a big red button, and pressed it.
The effect was instantaneous.
The low hum of the blue energy vanished from the platform, and the naked prisoner collapsed like a sack of bricks. His back smashed into the glossy surface, but he didn’t stir.
I stepped up onto the platform, just as every alarm in the building went off. Klaxons blared through hidden speakers, red lights exploded overhead, and shouts filled the mercs’ comms.
“Breach, breach!” one of them shouted.
“They’re in the building!” another howled, and his voice cut off in a sudden burst of static.
Giselle hadn’t been idle, and I couldn’t afford to, either.
While panic set into the armed guard around us, I swarmed up onto the platform and dropped into a crouch next to the naked supe.
I didn’t know what his powers were, but whatever that lightning shit was, I needed some of it for later. I laid a hand on his shin, glanced up onto the catwalk behind me, and saw a guy stop and shoulder his rifle.
Instinct took over. I raised my free arm, willed a shield to appear, and a shimmering disc of force appeared. A rifle round thumped into the shield with sparks. It spun off into the containers beside me with a ringing ricochet, and the damn notification finally flared up around my vision.
Transfer Failed
Corrupted Subject
Another round slammed into my shield and cracked it. I dived into a roll with a curse. I still hadn’t got my head around how my power-transferral worked, but it obviously didn’t work on Pinnacle’s test subjects.
I slid over the glossy floor of the machine, aimed for the batteries mounted next to the platform, and pulled up another shield around my feet. I stomped the heavy barrel-like storage units with everything I had.
One flew free of a socket and smashed into the ground. Lights flickered out over our heads. The shadows grew longer.
The visibility got worse for the guy who had a bead on me, and another round whipped past my ear as I scrambled off the energy-siphon and back to the cover of the containers.
“I have eyes on one, near unit number 3,” reported the shooter.
I held a hand to my ear so I could reply back to him.
“Yeah, and you can’t shoot for shit.”
“Comms are compromised!” the guard shouted.
I glued my back up against the solid steel of a container and peeked out to find the tattletale. A red laser-sight danced over the ground and my cover, giving me a pretty good idea of where he was set up.
I double-checked the chamber of the gun in my hand, grimaced, and swung out of cover. My shield whipped up to protect me from any stray rounds, and I fired thrice at the shadowy figure on the catwalk. It was dark, I didn’t have Giselle’s eagle eyes, but I’d spent years in worse conditions with worse weapons. The bullets hit home, and the guy staggered back.
I couldn’t confirm any killshots, but I had an opening.
I sprinted further into the maze of containers and aimed for the closest source of blue light. I’d left the unconscious supe alive, since I couldn’t tell if the guy was an innocent or not. The guys in an elevated position with hate-boners for me, though?
They were fair game.
Bullets skipped off the concrete and the steel around me. Bright sparks of light exploded against crates, almost blinding in the half-darkness, but none hit.
The guys above were blind-firing at a moving target. So long as I didn’t run into a bouncing round, I’d be fine. Adrenaline charged through me, and I heard Giselle grunt through the comms.
A high-pitched scream echoed throughout the warehouse as a guard upended himself and plummeted to embrace the concrete below. That counted for three definite enemies down. Five left, with the added fun of a homicidal supe with a cold voice.
“They’re going for the generators, you fuckwits,” Scourge said calmly.
“Sir, what about the others?” another guy shouted, panicked.
“Keep your eyes open,” the supe murmured. “You’ll be fine.”
A fierce grin stretched over my face as I slid past another container and arrived at the second siphon. Giselle was hell on wheels. She was all but invisible in the dark, impossible to hear, and even without the proper training, surprise was a hell of a tool in a chaotic environment.
I angled for the control panel and deactivated the field holding a painfully-emaciated woman in the air. She dropped to the ground like a stone. I sprinted around the wide circular disc of the machine, grabbed hold of one of the batteries, and dragged it away from the central unit. It was heavy as hell, but I was more than strong enough. I ripped all three of the barrel-like units out of the machine.
More of the lights in the warehouse winked out.
“Interesting tactics,” Scourge’s soft voice murmured. “Focus fire.”
Oh, shit.
I raised another shield, just in time. Bullets tap-tap-tapped into the translucent disk, shattering it almost instantly, but it’d bought me the space I needed to dive back into cover.
Another round cracked off the container above my head, and the brief flash of light illuminated a badge on the side of a crate that I’d seen before.
SilverSky Industries.
My dad’s folded company.
My eyes widened, yards of rationalization whipped through my head, and I elected to ignore them. What the actual fuck? How had my dad gotten mixed up with Pinnacle? Why had I found his insignia here, of all places, in the middle of a torture-powered power station?
A cannon-like muzzle went off above my head, and a heavy round the size of a soda can tore through the steel four inches above my head. A shower of sparks and molten metal cascaded down over my head, and Scourge let out a small chuckle.
I heard a huge bolt roll back on what I assumed was a portable howitzer before I broke for a thicker piece of cover.
“You can run, but you can’t hide,” Scourge said in a quiet sing-song.
I raised a hand to my stolen earpiece as I ran. “You can spit old cliches, but that doesn’t make them cool.”
I couldn’t help it. My adrenaline was up, my fight-or-flight was in full gear, and the instinctive terror of a firefight just demanded that I talk shit. I’d have gone crazy, otherwise, become some screaming headless chicken in the middle of a half-lit shooting gallery.
Another beast of a round missed me by two feet, blew through a container, and left a fist-sized hole in the thick metal.
Holy shit, what did he have up there? And where the hell had Scourge set up?
I caught a flash of blue energy behind me and pulled up a Barrier just in time. A streak of lightning smashed into my protective wall, spilled out around me in an oddly-liquid fashion. The naked woman from the last conduit stared at me with wide, hate-filled eyes.
Oh, boy, the human batteries were waking up cranky.
Blue light shone through the veins in her skin, lit her up like a neon sign. My gut twisted a little further as she advanced forward with an incomprehensible screech of pure agony. She dragged one of her feet behind her, and fresh power boiled up to her fingertips.
My whole arm tingled from the first impact, but my shield had held true against the surge of energy. I didn’t know how I’d fare against a second one, and with each breath that passed, I had a psycho with a cannon drawing another bead on me.
“I’m not your enemy!” I shouted to her. “I pulled you out of there!”
She didn’t hear me. Or she didn’t care.
The lightning-infused banshee launched herself across the concrete at my flank. Arcs of electricity sparked off her body, licking her surroundings as she went. She stretched her hands out to grab my throat.
Lightning flickered between her fingertips, and my gut instinct took over. I couldn’t let her get hold of me.
I brought up my pistol, shot her twice in the chest, and once in the skull. The science experiment dropped like a stone, and the lightning in her body vanished, like a light flicking off.
Another hail of bullets smashed into my shield, shattered it, and one cracked into my shoulder. The sheer force of it rocked me back like a heavyweight boxer’s punch, but it didn’t penetrate my vest.
I turned and I ran like hell, weaving in zig-zag to throw off the shooter’s aim, and fought off the nausea in my gut.
Whoever these new, made-to-order supes were, they weren’t like the rest.
They were disposable, organic batteries for Pinnacle. They hadn’t been gifted with the same toughness, virtual invincibility, or earth-shattering power. I couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d been made, and not found in the wild. Which opened a whole new barrel of monkeys that I wasn’t ready for.
Another scream of pain and terror echoed through the warehouse as Giselle dumped another merc off the catwalk.
I made a beeline for the third siphon.
“Getting tired?” Scourge whispered in my ear.
“Getting tired of your bullshit,” I fired back. “Where’d you learn to shoot?”
I skidded into a slide as he made a soft hissing noise, and another huge round whipped over my head and hit a stack of pallets. Flaming splinters exploded into the air, as if a grenade had just gone off, and I covered up with a shield to take the worst out of the cloud of shrapnel.
I dipped to the left, rounded another corner, and found myself face-to-face with one of the mercs. The barrel of his rifle snapped toward me, and I lifted my shield up just as his finger squeezed the trigger.
The shot ricocheted off the hazy barrier, and Giselle appeared out of nowhere like an avenging angel.
