Objects in Motion: A Progression Fantasy Adventure, page 28
“They wouldn’t—well, I guess they would,” Cayleb corrected himself, sheepishly rubbing at his armored cranium. “I guess they had me locked in the basement churning out stuff, but that’s what I want to do anyway.”
“It’s not for me,” Isaac said. “You see why I want to keep some stuff quiet. As far as the fines and such, I’ll figure something out. Hell, releasing all of Blacktime’s information ought to be worth something.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t sent it all to the press first.” Cayleb laughed.
“Who says I sent it all to the press?” Isaac grinned back.
“Huh, well—” Cayleb was interrupted by a beeping from his arm-computer. He glanced at it and then pursed his lips. “Oh, the press conference is on. Want to see it, since I know you’ve complained about Glorybeam before.”
“Eh,” Isaac said indifferently. Really, he wasn’t all that interested. It was likely to be more empty platitudes, as it always was. “I’m not happy about Glorybeam, but I’ve never been after her all that hard,” he pointed out. “It’s more that I needed to get the encryption on that tape broken, which Greg did—you remember Greg—and he wanted to publish the Glorybeam dirt. And I mean, I’m not going to protect her.”
“Greg? No, I don’t remember Greg,” Cayleb said and shrugged. Isaac shrugged back, not terribly surprised, before Cayleb reached over and turned the television back on, spinning the knob to show Channel 3—apparently it was connected to normal broadcast as well as the internal systems.
Glorybeam floated just outside of Star Central, her golden armor polished as usual and faceless helmet making it impossible to know what she was thinking. Administrator Ike himself was visible in the background, embedded in the massive travel chair, the deep scars on his hairless head and face obvious even at a distance. Some lady was talking just out of frame as the camera panned from Ike to Glorybeam, then suddenly whirled around and framed the crowd of reporters before the operator focused on something up in the air. A spherical drone.
For a moment, Isaac stared at the familiar sight, wondering why the person behind them would do something so stupid as attacking a site with so many supers. Then he realized—hardly anyone might know the power suppressor was ranged or that it was permanent. He was on his feet before he realized it and turned to Cayleb.
“You have to warn them that suppressor thing is dangerous,” he said. “Whoever is using them modified it. They attack at a distance, and it doesn’t wear off.”
“It doesn’t…?” Cayleb frowned at the monitor.
“Yeah, saw it happen. She’s still depowered.”
“Oh. Shit,” Cayleb said, tapping frantically away at his armband. On the television, a familiar ripple appeared around the drone, and a golden wave swept out to meet it. The camera blurred as it fired, the air distorting as two forces met—and the gold vanished. The camera whipped around, and wild focus caught the golden-armored figure plummeting down to the stage.
Glorybeam.
SEVENTEEN
GLORYFALL
Ike’s chair beeped warnings as he watched Glorybeam suddenly crumple, suppressing panic hormones and leaving him clearheaded. His fingers touched certain buttons on the control panel of their own accord, activating the outer defenses of Star Central. Concealed panels opened up all over the skyscraper, tinker guns and shield projectors whirring to life at the same time he began issuing orders.
“Bulk, Makebelieve, take that out, collateral authorized. Motion Patrol, crowd control. Rescue Squad, recover Glorybeam and get her inside. Thoughtstealer, do a local deep sweep. Find if there’s anyone nearby.” Generally, the more potent supers had some restrictions on what they were really supposed to do in order to prevent them from making things worse. Someone like Captain Bulk could topple buildings, and in the busy downtown, that was a terrible idea unless there was no other choice. Like now.
His supers burst into motion, reacting without the panic shown by the press. Most of his people were professionals, but not all of them, and even then, if he personally hesitated, there would be chaos. Not everyone at the press conference was used to working as a team.
Bulk immediately ripped a light pole out of the ground, sending fragments of asphalt everywhere, broken electrical conduits arcing and snapping as he took aim. It looked like a javelin in his oversized hand, but instead of a straight throw, he sent it in a wide, whipping arc, whirling over the heads of the assembled press—only to be blasted apart by smaller drones as they emerged from stealth. Which didn’t deter Bulk, who held out his hand. Makebelieve’s flat, glassy eyes glowed, and the light pole reconstituted itself in the larger super’s hand. The fragments of the original, sadly, ricocheted out to crash through windows and into the brickwork of the buildings across the way.
The suppressor drone began spooling up again but was forced to dodge as, this time, half a dozen pieces of steel from the now-disassembled light pole were launched at it in quick succession, overwhelming the ability of the smaller attack drones to destroy them. At the same time, Stop Motion and Sparkle Motion swept over the crowd, removing people in twos and threes at a pace beyond what the unaugmented eye could follow. The twins in the Rescue Squad carried Glorybeam off the stage, rushing her into the watchful protection of Star Central’s defenses.
He only glanced away for a few moments, but when he looked back the entire stage where everyone had been standing a second before was flying through the air, Captain Bulk launching the chunk of metal and wood at a few hundred miles an hour. Where the streetlight had failed, the massive hulk of the stage succeeded, crashing into the suppressor drone and sending it into the opposite building. Bulk followed, flying after it with a new light pole in hand as a tool to finish the job.
Mechaniacal’s drones were not, in many respects, all that tough. Nothing like a fully armored tinker-made weapon could be. But it was on file that the suppressor’s effect suffused its construction, rendering many ranged powers useless and even shrugging off some tinker effects. Their outer shell was tough enough to render small-arms fire useless and just maneuverable enough to make it difficult to engage with anything low-powered. Not a problem in the air, but in the dense city they were incredibly difficult to destroy or disable without collateral damage—and the imposter’s drones seemed to be given thicker armor, requiring even more force to deal with even if they weren’t as quick.
Normally, destroying Mechaniacal’s creations didn’t justify the collateral damage required. But they didn’t usually attack people directly, or at range, and they weren’t the primary threat anyway. It was the smaller attack drones or the slightly larger scavenger drones that could take things. Or, even worse, the large kidnap drones that could take people. And never before had they taken out Glorybeam.
“Go to alert level one,” he instructed, depressing the appropriate buttons on his chair. “Glowfly, Stomp, Lunar Bolt—take your squads and sweep the city. Identify and remove any Mechaniacal tech you can find.” The alarms began to wail all over Star City as people were directed to the shelters. It might not be necessary, but so long as Glorybeam was out of action, there was the possibility of a follow-up attack that relied on not having a sovereign-class super to defend them. Not to mention the inevitable rioting that was likely to result from such an upset.
“Vilmonica, pull in all our long-range patrols and set up overtime schedules,” he said, since that was going to be required, even if the immediate threat was dealt with.
With the suppressor drone out of the way, it didn’t take long for the other assembled supers to remove the attack drones, crushing, melting, freezing, or slicing them apart, depending on which super was doing the destruction. Bulk emerged from the hole he’d made in the far building, carrying the broken pieces of the suppressor drone, as Stop Motion and Sparkle Motion dived into the same building to start sorting out any injured.
The press pool were, of course, snapping photos and shouting questions from the safe remove where they’d been put, but weren’t stupid enough to come near an active scene with powers still being flung about. Vilmonica was going to be absolutely livid that this was all captured publicly, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that.
“Mocker, to me,” Ike said, and the warlock appeared next to him in a swirl of shadow as Bulk delivered the pieces of the drone. Mechaniacal had long ago learned some trick to insulate his creations from much of magical clairvoyance, which was why they hadn’t simply swept up all of the ancient caches years ago, but whoever was operating them now likely didn’t have quite the same finesse. Especially as it seemed likely this one had been modified and so directly touched by whoever was responsible. “See if you can grab anything from this.”
Ichabod’s clairvoyant muttered a few words, hands moving in arcane gestures as he cast his spells. Bits of mechanisms floated into the air, metal popping and pinging as magical forces warred with tinker skill and slowly dismembered the drone’s remains. Wheels and gears spun into the air alongside cogs and springs, pieces ranging from hand-sized to practically microscopic floating above the casing as Mocker pulled it apart. No particular piece stood out from any other, but the disturbing sense of dread that Mechaniacal’s designs imposed faded as Mocker dismembered it, and soon enough he pulled out something different from the rest.
A tiny scrap of fabric, which moved to flutter above Mocker’s hand. For some reason it looked familiar, and by the warlock’s expression, he agreed. Arcane glyphs flashed around the thumbnail-sized bit of cloth as he interrogated it, then he sighed and turned to Ike.
“A piece of Lunar Bolt’s uniform. Modified like the sample down in the lab. Tracing it beyond that just dead-ends; magical nullifiers in place.”
“Ah.” Ike stared at it, needing to take a moment to dredge up all the relevant details from his memory. There were always enough ongoing crises that switching from one to another was sometimes difficult. “Our mysterious metas connect.”
“Less mysterious than you might have hoped,” Mocker said. “We picked up Isaac Hartson this morning, and he believes, at least, that he is Dimetria, the meta who fought off Brawn-dude and Blue Blast, and the one responsible for this.” He reached out to snatch the cloth from the air. “And he claims to have no connection with the Mechaniacal technology, but rather, he’s been attacked by it.”
“Which is still a connection,” Ike noted, glancing past Mocker at the perimeter drawn up by some of his less-mobile supers. Concretor, Steelbody, The Iron Lily—they were still vulnerable to the power suppressor, but anything else was going to have a tough time making it through, even from the air. “Where is this Isaac now?”
“I put him in Interrogation Two,” Mocker said. “Thoughtstealer was monitoring, but…” Ike nodded and pressed the intercom button on his chair. Ordering Thoughtstealer off to do a deep sweep would have taken her away from the observation room, which was unfortunate but had been necessary.
“Thoughtstealer? What is the disposition of Isaac Hartson?”
“One moment,” came Thoughtsealer’s precise syllables. Ike was patient; he’d already asked her to scan the crowd, so there was no telling where she was. His telepath, unfortunately, required either physical proximity or a specific and very large tinker amplifier, and even then it took time for her to look for hostility or evil thought. “Isaac Hartson is no longer in the interrogation room.”
“Mocker?” Ike didn’t waste time either bemoaning the situation or trying to find someone to blame. They had made the decisions they needed to at the time, and now that the warlock had actually made contact with the guy, tracking him down shouldn’t be too difficult. Once again Mocker began to chant, pulling a crystal focus from somewhere beneath his robes and waving his fingers at it. Then he sighed and put it away again.
“Isaac Hartson, whoever he truly is, doesn’t exist at the moment.” Mocker shook his head. “Not dead, in abeyance like we’ve seen before. I am not certain whether it’s some bizarre aspect of his power or if we still have to worry about a telepath. Yet, if he actually is each of those people…”
“It would simplify matters immensely,” Ike agreed and switched channels on his comms. “Vilmonica, find someone who’s free to do a search-and-grab. We have a subject that recently escaped Star Central custody, only minutes ago. He couldn’t have gone far.”
Isaac hoped Cayleb wouldn’t be in trouble for the broken door.
After the alarms went off, Cayleb had—for obvious reasons—needed to skedaddle. Everyone in Star Central had places to be, and Isaac had taken that as his cue to leave. The door lock definitely hadn’t been up to the task of resisting his inertially overcharged book, and he hadn’t looked out of place running along the hallways that strobed with the flashing red lights of an alarm. Everyone else was in the same headlong rush, the non-meta staff of Star Central taking shelter or going to their posts.
The door to the parking garage had even been unlocked, though he couldn’t fault that, and he just followed the exit signs for the stairs going up. People had to leave somehow, especially during a crisis. He assumed that getting in would be harder—but either way, he was able to make it to the parking lot and across the way to duck into a nearby alley. One where there were no people or cameras in sight.
What he really needed was another disguise, but he didn’t have anything on him, and not nearly enough time to even go buy new clothes. Though the artisan in him cringed at the idea, he took off his shirt and turned it into a durag, wrapping it around his head, then braced himself against the unpleasant noise and tore off the legs of his jeans, using the line between partial inertial imbuement where the fabric was just too weak to support the force of its own movement. It was definitely too chilly to be dressed that way, like some tweaking loser, but it probably made him nigh-unrecognizable.
“Yakov Bolz,” Isaac said, naming the persona and leaning into the little bit of power flux that came with it, trying not to imagine a muscle lifting but rather just a force going in that direction. He wasn’t entirely certain how well it worked, but he tried to lean into what he was doing in general. It wasn’t clear to him if he could apply his power to something as nebulous as escaping from Star Central, but he’d take any help he could get.
The city sirens came on, wailing in the distinctive way that urged people to take shelter. Isaac peered out of the alley, looking at the press pool and assorted bystanders who were still milling about, and strolled over to join them. As much as he wanted to run as far and as fast as he could, that would just make him an obvious target. Someone would come looking for him as soon as the current crisis was over, if not before.
He had no idea what the telepath could do, so he did his best to keep his mind empty and just focus on what was going on around him as the gaggle of press people with their cameras herded themselves down to the nearest shelter. Star Central itself was, in fact, not one of those shelters, as it was likely to be a target when something happened.
Most people around him were talking about the incident, gesticulating excitedly as if they needed to rehash what they all had just seen with their eyes. Several of the reporters had dictaphones out, muttering into the recording tubes as they spun out a full account for the papers and news stations later on. On the other side of the spectrum, there were a few civilians, probably just super-fans, who looked shell-shocked. As well they might, seeing Glorybeam brought down.
It was even colder in the reinforced concrete of the shelter than it was outside, and he had to keep himself from shivering by sheer willpower. Instead, he held the springy, loose-jointed gait of the soft-drug types he’d seen, where somehow they seemed energetic despite all the nonsense they consumed, keeping his eyelids lowered as he let the crowd jostle him into the middle.
“Star City’s own sovereign-class super was dealt a major blow today—”
“Did you see them take out that drone! Like, bam, boom, right through the wall!”
“For the eighth time, I already saw, I don’t need you to—”
“Yeah, this is James. I’m in a shelter. Yeah? Yeah, good. Look, tell Mom that she should pull the trigger on that move. Might be safer getting somewhere with another sovereign.”
He wondered if the last person knew something or was just panicking. So far as he knew, the knowledge that the suppressors were permanent was not common. He assumed Crash had told Blacktime, but there was no telling how far it had spread from there. And perhaps Crash hadn’t said anything—or hadn’t known—about the ranged capabilities.
Isaac did his best to blend in, eventually sitting down on one of the molded stone benches that came with the shelters and watching a reporter interview a fan about the incident. It would make for good television later, especially with one of the other reporters maneuvering a handheld diffuser to provide picture-perfect lighting despite the shelter’s overhead and the still-strobing alarm lights by the door. In the meantime, he leafed through the book he’d taken—The Motives and Methods of Sovereign Powers by J.D. Whittaker, required reading in high school—and carefully removed all the inertia from the pages.
There was a small commotion at the front of the shelter, and Isaac glanced over to see a trio of supers in blue uniforms appear through the doorway, one of them hovering a head above anyone else and peering around. It was probably just paranoia, but he had the immediate thought they were there for him. A suspicion that was actually confirmed a moment later.
“Isaac Hartson!” one of them called, the three supers studying the room. Isaac only barely kept himself from reacting, leaning into his vague-minded, hippie persona and joining the others in glancing around. It seemed that his acting passed muster, for after a moment the three left, one flying and the others moving at superhuman speeds.
It was almost another hour before the alarms finally cut out. Some people left before then, but Isaac wanted to be as inconspicuous as possible. So he shuffled out with everyone else, making the same complaints about the length of the emergency, and headed off into the city with an unhurried gait. The walk to the gym where he’d left his stuff seemed to take forever, especially since the streets were overrun with supers’ patrols, flying through the air or driving branded cars or motorcycles. None of them gave him much of a look, following the sound of local sirens or emergency vehicles.
