Objects in Motion: A Progression Fantasy Adventure, page 5
The quiet actually gave him time to consider whether he really wanted to hit the armored van, but Crash specifically issuing orders against anything lethal assuaged most of his worries. Though he had to wonder what exactly Star City was shipping out in the dead of night that had Blacktime interested. Unless Crash was going to send it out right away, Isaac might do well to take it at the same time he grabbed what he could from Crash’s records.
He was still chewing it over when the convoy appeared, an armored van with a pickup truck ahead of and behind it. Obvious, but at that time of night, only obvious to people looking for it. Smokeshow flicked her cigarette over the edge of the building, reaching up to tap a pin on her leather jacket that Isaac only belatedly recognized as a comms device of some sort.
“Showtime,” she said, and smoke flooded the intersection.
THREE
SUPER-FIGHT
Isaac had never actually fought another meta. Aside from a few fistfights when he was just a kid, when everyone got stuffed into the foster home and left there while the world moved on, he’d avoided anything of that nature. He hadn’t even bothered with any structured martial arts and only came to his appreciation for the gym after leaving foster care. Of course he could throw a punch, but he was a meta, and his fights were super-fights. The slightest slip-up could kill him or someone else, destroy a car, wreck a building.
Despite it being necessary, those were the thoughts that weighed on his mind as he unwrapped the chains around his arms. On the street below, the lights of the convoy vanished into Smokeshow’s power, Banshee’s voice lifted up in an eerie song, and muffled detonations flashed through the obscuring smoke. Blast Fist’s power, Isaac presumed.
A second later, a strangely distorted echo of gunfire rose from the smoke, echoing off buildings and making Isaac wince, prompting him to push even more inertia into his clothes. It sounded a lot more powerful than the handguns he got plinked with when he stole the softchips, but there were limits on how much he could push into something. He would have loved to have proper tinker armor, something tailored to his powers, but regular cloth and the theatrical chains would have to do.
He heard some tinny sounds from Smokeshow’s communicator pin, then more gunfire, and suddenly someone in dark tactical gear launched themselves out of the cloud and up toward the roof. The meta pointed a small, ugly-looking gun at Isaac and Smokeshow, and Isaac forced himself to step in front of the girl, crossing his forearms in front of his face—and wishing he’d worn a mask or something—as another rattle of gunfire hit.
The bullets felt like being smacked by a small child, enough to sting but not enough to bruise, most hitting his clothing but a few pinging off the chains. The merc landed on the roof, eyes narrowed behind a military helmet, so Isaac flung the handful of chain his way. Rather than dodge it, the man flicked up some kind of energy shield, holding it out in front of him—not expecting Isaac’s chains to hit like a half-ton of metal.
The merc clearly had super strength and probably some other ancillary powers but didn’t have whatever he needed to deal with the physics of high-inertial chains. The shield held, but the guy was launched over the edge, back into the smoke, and Isaac found himself breathing heavily even if the entire exchange had taken only a few seconds. It wasn’t even a real fight, not yet.
He spun a few feet of the chains, leaving the rest to dangle from his wrist and waiting for the follow-up. There was more gunfire, explosions, and some shouts from the completely obscured intersection below, and Isaac took a step forward to peer over the edge. Apparently someone was waiting for that, since a fist smashed into his face.
Isaac staggered back a few paces, but even without armor it was more like being slapped than the bone-crushing punch it was meant to be as the inertia applied to every part of him. Even the face. From his own testing with invested sandbags, he knew how strange it was to hit something that felt denser and heavier than it really was. Or, because weight didn’t actually change, like hitting something embedded in gel or water. So for something to hit him hard enough to send him reeling backward, it had to have a lot of force behind it.
He stumbled back a step, the sudden shock focusing his thoughts, and whipped around one of the chains as the same merc hopped onto the rooftop again. Unlike Isaac, he did have training and ducked. Though when Isaac clipped the metal roof and tore right through it without slowing, the merc aborted any attempt to charge, pausing a moment to eye Isaac while flexing the hand he’d used for the punch.
Isaac blinked again, his face slightly numb; the clarity that came with being punched in the face was so welcome he could almost thank the merc. Because now Isaac realized he didn’t have to attack at all, just sit there and be a discouragement against anyone going after Smokeshow. Who probably didn’t really need the help anyway, if she could shift into smoke. But nobody was completely invulnerable, as shown by the defeat of powerful villains—and the occasional hero—over the years.
The merc stowed his gun, reaching for his tactical rigging and extracting a pair of batons—which crackled with electricity. That was a problem, since Isaac was pretty sure his power did nothing against that. Still, Isaac kept the chains swinging and didn’t make any offensive moves. With the amount of investment he had, the chains were cutting through metal and brick, and without the shield, Isaac wasn’t sure that the mercenary could take a hit from them. He sure didn’t want to kill anyone, and for his purposes just keeping the meta off-balance was good enough.
For a few moments neither of them moved, the sounds of gunfire and detonations echoing from below, then the merc charged forward with one baton outstretched. Isaac didn’t bother with anything fancy, just letting the chain slip to its full length as he swung it, not aiming directly at the merc but just in front of him, trying to make the opponent back off. Despite not going all that fast, it made an odd ripping noise as it displaced the air. Not that it mattered since the merc ducked under it easily and then was inside Isaac’s reach.
The baton touched Isaac’s chest with an odd, hollow jolt, a bizarre sort of pain that hazed his vision as the merc tried to shoulder-check Isaac but bounced off. Isaac’s other hand twitched from the baton’s effects, smacking the merc in the hip—and sending him flying off the roof again. Isaac wobbled and had to fight hard from falling himself, his whole body twitching and aching in a way that was more disturbing than outright painful.
“Alright, we’ve got the stuff,” Smokeshow said abruptly. “Let’s get outta here.”
“Right,” Isaac croaked, tottering toward the fire escape as Smokeshow shifted into her vaporous form, but they were interrupted yet again. Not by a mercenary, but by a bona fide superhero appearing in the sky. In the dim light of the city and the crescent moon, all he could tell about the costume was that it was some light color, with short fins on the forearms.
“Stop!” the super said, not that anyone was going to listen to her. Isaac just hoped the superhero wasn’t some tactical or strategic-class powerhouse and that Smokeshow could shield their escape. Unfortunately, thanks to the smoke meta’s efforts, he was the only one of their little hijacking squad that was visible. When her ultimatum fell flat, she went after Isaac.
There was a blur and then an absolute hammer-blow as something seemed to kick his stomach through his spine. He gagged, folding over as he vaguely recognized he was in motion. It was like the one time he’d been in a car crash—everything blurred and distant as things just happened, out of control.
Stone, metal, and glass gave way as he smashed through a building. The ground shuddered as he landed again, and with a blink he realized he was in the road once more, in a small crater of asphalt. Smoke rolled over where he was, and part of Isaac was glad that Smokeshow wasn’t just leaving him to get picked up by Star Central as he staggered to his feet. He spat bile, taking a moment to figure out exactly where he’d gone before a clear corridor opened up in the smoke. Isaac staggered blindly along it, lurching into a one-way sign and shearing it off before he had the presence of mind to pull away all the inertia he’d invested in himself. Hobbling forward along the pathway, he stumbled upon the car, which had been maybe fifty feet away.
“Good job,” Smokeshow said from the driver’s seat, eyeing him uncertainly while Columbuzz waited patiently in the seat behind her. “You okay?”
Isaac grunted in reply, wondering why he hadn’t seen or heard any follow-up from the super—or the mercs for that matter—but not wanting to question how Smokeshow’s power worked. He found himself in the passenger’s seat, hands automatically buckling the seat belt, and Smokeshow stepped on the gas.
He slumped there, holding his stomach and fighting nausea, brooding as the car chimed and sped along the smoke-obscured roads. It was one thing to play at being a ganger and try to get at Crash’s secrets, but it was another to get into superfights that wrecked buildings and could hurt innocent bystanders. That was exactly the kind of hypocrisy he wanted to expose, not participate in.
It was a given that Crash had close contact with Blacktime; Cayleb had done enough snooping on Isaac’s behalf to confirm that. Actually tapping the communications was another matter entirely, and Blacktime certainly had tinkers on the payroll to keep that from happening. Isaac didn’t have the talents with electronics that Cayleb did, but his goal was to get physical access to Crash’s records anyway. Secure phones couldn’t stop Isaac from swiping papers, or entire computers for that matter.
If Isaac had to play at being a villain for weeks on end to get that material, though, then it was obvious he needed backup plans. Hopefully it was either extreme good or bad luck that there had been an operation so soon after he showed up. Because he wasn’t sure he could do it again.
“Lunar Bolt hits pretty hard,” Smokeshow said, driving along inside a cloud of smoke, completely unconcerned by the fact that even the road was obscured. “We’ve got some QwikMed if you need it.”
Isaac grunted again, trying to figure out if he was really all that hurt.
Most supers with some form of durability—most physical supers, really—also had amplified healing. Isaac had neither, and he didn’t even know how bad being kicked through a building was. It hadn’t been fun, but it was hard to know if he had to worry about injuries he hadn’t noticed. The fact that he could still breathe meant it wasn’t too bad, at least; he’d been punched in the gut before, without powers, and it had been slightly more unpleasant.
“Glovebox, right side,” Smokeshow told him, and Isaac followed the directions. He didn’t even know why he’d been so against asking for it, because better safe than sorry. It wasn’t like he could go to a hospital straight from a crime scene.
QwikMed was technically a controlled good, since taking too many too quickly could have serious side effects. Isaac had seen plenty of them, of course, since he’d actually carried around boxes of the stuff when he worked at the hospital. They looked like a giant adhesive bandage, about the size of his palm, but were actually some form of bizarre drug injector. He opened the little box and peeled back the film, rolling up his shirt and applying the patch to his quickly bruising belly.
The relief was instant, the nausea and a disorientation he didn’t know he had vanishing. It seemed miraculous, and probably was, but he remembered all the warnings on the box. Food, drink, rest, and lots of it. Nothing came for free, even if it was meta work.
“I had some doubts,” Columbuzz said, speaking in his strange vibrato. “But you acquitted yourself well, Chains.”
Isaac grunted, finding he actively resented the approval of the ganger. On the other hand, it sounded like his identity sure had established itself among the metas. Something to take advantage of as soon as possible.
A few minutes of driving later and the smoke cleared up, showing that they’d arrived in an entirely different part of the city. Behind them, the other car with, presumably, the object of interest followed, lights reflecting off the side mirror. They quickly lost themselves in the usual traffic of the commercial parts of the city, which was not insignificant even in the dead of night, and Smokeshow drove the car in an unhurried, sedate manner that certainly implied she’d done it before.
There wasn’t much conversation as Smokeshow steered them on a roundabout route past skyscrapers, gas stations, banks, and malls. The only real conversation was when Smokeshow spoke through the comm pin to correct the driver of the other car—one of the Smack Twins—when they took a wrong turn after getting separated by a red light. Eventually, though, they did return to the slums, putting the cars into a little garage a couple blocks from Crash’s place. The garage itself was nice on the interior, despite the run-down look, showing it was part of the same black-market operation.
Isaac got out and stretched, finding himself in surprisingly good shape, though suddenly starving. Given Chains’s persona, he didn’t complain, just gritted his teeth and followed everyone else out of the garage and down the street to the main building. Unsurprisingly, Crash was already there, looking no worse for the wear save for one of the spikes on his oversized pauldrons being bent.
“Great!” He boomed as they trooped in, looking around at them. “Got the package?”
“Yes,” Banshee said, holding a metal box maybe two feet on a side with a pair of digit-code locks integrated into the sides. She put it down on the table, and Crash immediately popped it open by simply ripping off the locks and lifting the lid. It revealed a number of tiny machines, each one about the size of a finger, all packaged in a plastic matrix, their cameras glinting in the overhead light.
“Perfect,” Crash said, setting the plastic and its machines aside to reveal a control box, which he toggled on. The lights on the machines ignited, along with a faint whirring, to show they were actually drones, miniaturized surveillance devices. “Great job, everyone.” He reached into a pocket and tossed a small credstick to each of them. Isaac caught his absently, still staring at the package.
“Take a couple days off and enjoy yourself,” Crash told them, turning off the controls and putting the drones back in the box. “We’ve got to figure out what to do with the new toys.”
Isaac didn’t really listen to any of the chatter going on as he walked out of Crash’s place. He was too fixated on the fact that he recognized the hand behind the drones. Every tinker had their own style, and after a decade, Isaac certainly recognized that one. They were Cayleb’s work.
Administrator Ike tapped a finger impatiently on his control pad as he waited for the other supers to arrive. The briefing room was just as he liked it, a severe and unornamented set of white chairs around a white table, with white lights and black walls. His own podium was also black and white, sized to hold the life support chair that kept him alert and mobile and hid the troubling deformities from his old life as a superhero.
Captain Bulk was the first to arrive, his enormous frame demonstrating the need for nine-foot-tall doors within Star Central, and he lowered himself with deliberate care into a chair sized for him. Despite the silly name, Captain Bulk was definitely one of the best at his rank, the tactical-class hero not only having flight, strength, and speed, but also the sort of earnest, gentle personality only people who grew up knowing their own strength created. Absolutely a hit with the public and trustworthy.
The next set were what Ike considered to be fairly middling, though still important. Greengrocer and her plant powers did the heavy lifting for feeding Star City, augmenting the massive vertical farms and underground ranches built into the mountain and preventing a need to seize territory outside the city even when the population grew. Something that might have destabilized the balancing act between the Five City Alliance and the Grove Guardians, who claimed most of the wilderness along the coast. Her assistant, Sunspot, was just as involved in the massive farming operations, and while both of them could have been decent combat heroes, they were better used on support.
Lunar Bolt limped in last, favoring her right foot and grumbling under her breath. Ike raised one sparse eyebrow as she took her seat, as it was fairly rare for the common-class superhero to take any sort of injury—at least, without her being put into full medical care. He knew exactly where she had been deployed and why, so he looked forward to hearing what had happened.
“Greengrocer, Bulk,” he said, starting the debriefing without any ceremony. “Any significant damage to the farms?”
“No, Crash just did some aesthetic damage, really,” Greengrocer said. “Collapsed a nearly empty warehouse, but we can get that fixed quickly.”
“He didn’t stay to fight much,” Bulk said, his voice an almost musical bass. “Obviously just a feint, but maybe a reminder, too. That he and Blacktime know exactly where Star City’s weakness is.”
“It doesn’t take much of a genius to attack a supply train,” Ike said but nodded at Bulk. His input might not have come from an analysis after the fact, but from the interaction with Crash in the moment. For the most part, Administrator Ike knew which supers he could trust to judge such things and which needed to be kept on a short leash, and Bulk was definitely the former. If only the man could have been sovereign-class rather than tactical-class, the world would probably look quite different.
“Power’s fine,” Sunspot said, the thin and frankly limp-wristed man said without prompting or even a fleck of care, clearly wanting to return to tending his generators and solar lamps buried in the mountain. Ike didn’t press him and turned to the last and most interesting participant of the night’s excitement.
“It was Crash’s little team,” Lunar Bolt sighed. “I recognize Smokeshow’s work, so I assume the rest of them were around, but I only saw a new guy, young, maybe in his twenties. The mercs said he was bulletproof, so I assumed standard toughness. But I don’t know. Never run into anything like that.”
