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CHAPTER ONE
May, 2013
Fort Justice
New York Bay
Sometimes, it seemed like all of Sally’s old friends were leaving her.
First had been Juice, announcing his appointment to direct the Parahuman Resources Agency at the same Christmas party where Jason had proposed marriage, and Sally had accepted. Then only a month after they moved into Fort Justice, the repurposed oil rig in the middle of New York Bay, Jack had announced his own retirement. It might have been because a small but noisy part of the fringe media still thought he’d been the one who shot Senator Goodwin, even after his innocence had been proven. She was the high priestess of the anti-parahuman movement, and some days it felt like her acolytes were Legion.
Doublecharge retired from her command role in Just Cause Denver after a great many years of her humorless leadership. That she would be carrying on her humorless leadership as the Assistant Director of the Parahuman Resources Administration was a joke not lost on Sally. Even MetalBlade and his wife Icebreaker, co-commanders of Just Cause Richmond had finally succumbed to the call of a life of relative quiet as the principal and Dean of Students at the Hero Academy.
The upheaval in command structures was matched by the rapidly expanding population of American parahumans, and it felt to Sally like Just Cause New York had become the Management Training Program for future Just Cause Team Commanders. It was, as Jason liked to say, a heavy trip for someone who wasn’t yet thirty years old.
The other thing Jason tended to point out about her age was the risks of pregnancy complications after age thirty increased. It was no secret to her he wanted children. His mother hounded him far more than she thought was appropriate about wanting a grandchild to spoil rotten. Neither of his younger brothers seemed the least bit interested either in settling down or making an effort to pass along their genes, so Jason’s mom had settled upon him as her last chance to achieve some form of immortality.
Sally loved Mrs. Tibbets dearly—almost as much as she loved her own mom—but she wished the woman would just stop.
It had become a topic of frustration in their marriage. Sally didn’t mind being around children so much. Jason had taught her that much over the ten years they’d been together. He loved to visit youth centers and shoot hoops with the kids who didn’t have as much good fortune in their lives, or toss around a football, or teach them to play the guitar. He was always patient and cheerful with the kids, even when they were crawling all over him. Of course, being strong enough to toss a car half a block meant he had to be extra careful.
In Sally’s mind, the best thing about other people’s kids was they didn’t have to come home with you. If she wanted to spend an off night binge-watching a season of a show, she could without the interruptions that kids always seemed to bring. Or she could walk around naked. Or have a quickie with Jason up against the wall without worrying about prying eyes.
There hadn’t been much of anything with Jason recently, quick or otherwise, and Sally had the sinking feeling it was her fault. There had been arguments—she hesitated to call them fights—some of which had resulted in them sleeping in separate parts of their suite. She’d rearranged duty schedules to limit the amount of time off they had together in the hope that perhaps absence might make their hearts grow fonder, but instead it meant she had more time on her own to brood.
She was getting pretty good at brooding.
“You need to knock it off,” Sondra told her. Her dear friend had accepted the Team Commander position for the new Just Cause Dallas team and had Skyped in to chat. “You’re going to give yourself scowl lines.”
“Better than stretch marks,” Sally retorted, and then wished she hadn’t.
Sondra didn’t seem to mind. She just smiled and patted her expanding belly. In direct opposition to the wishes of her doctor, she’d gone ahead and gotten pregnant at the age of forty. Not only that, she’d decided not to retire like so many other superheroines had when getting themselves knocked up. Conventional wisdom was being a superhero was too much of a high risk occupation for a pregnant woman, but then, Sondra had never taken much stock in conventional wisdom. “Stretch marks don’t bother me,” said the raven-haired woman. “I just wish my damn feathers would make up their minds about molting.” She flapped her magnificent brown and white wings for emphasis, sending a shower of tiny pinfeathers scattering in the breeze.
“How long is that going to go on?” Sally asked.
“I have no idea. I’ve never been pregnant before.”
“Do you guys know what it is yet?”
“No, not yet. It’s still a little early to determine that.” She chuckled. “Jack’s hoping it’s an egg.”
Sally’s eyes widened. “Could it be?” After all, she reasoned, her friend was part bird.
Sondra broke into real laughter. “No, of course not. He just wants to take my picture sitting on one.” She winked. “I think it’s a fetish.”
“We’re failing the Bechdel Test right now, you know.” Sally’s scowl returned. “We’re supposed to be talking about when I’m going to come visit Fort Kennedy.”
“Soon, I hope. Maribel is planning my baby shower and you better clear your schedule, because it’s going to be epic.” Maribel was one of Sondra’s teammates, a savvy young superstar called It Girl, whose power of self-duplication was only secondary to her social media skills. The Just Cause organization had been without a broad media-appeal personality since Jack retired a few years earlier, but It Girl appeared to be the real thing. She wasn’t just a trending topic, she was the one setting the trends. She could change platforms as effortlessly and quickly as turning pages in a book.
“It sounds terrifying,” said Sally. “I can’t wait.”
“Look, things with Jason will settle down. He’s got to respect your wishes. After all, it isn’t him who’ll be blimping up for the full forty.”
Sally snickered. “He might anyway. He’s getting love handles.”
“For all you know, your own baby clock might go off tomorrow. Or next year. Or ten years from now. Girl, you’re twenty-eight and at the top of your game. Enjoy it. Gray hairs will come soon enough.”
“True. My grandma and mom both waited into their late thirties. Maybe I will, too. Maybe by then I’ll feel like growing a parasite of my own.”
Sondra snorted. “Nice. That’s not going to give me nightmares tonight.”
Davey appeared at Sally’s office door. Her hyper-competent assistant had her mass of hair pinned up into artful disarray around her face as she chewed on the end of a pen. “Hey, I’ve got to go. Duty calls. Tell Jack hello and call him a punk ass for me.”
“I will. Hugs and kisses to Jason.” Sondra broke the connection, leaving Sally facing a blank chat window.
“Sorry to interrupt, Boss,” said Davey. “I was going to let you finish.”
“It’s all right, Davey. We were finished for the time being. What’s up?”
Davey held up a stack of folders. “Personnel reviews. They’re due tomorrow, and I know how you like to wait until the last minute for this sort of thing.”
Sally felt like melting into her desk. Paperwork. She’d never realized just how much paperwork was involved in the daily operation of a government superhero team. There were reports. Reviews. Forms. More reports. Reviews of reports. Reports on the reviews of the reports. “How many forests did we decimate this week?”
Davey smiled. “Maybe you’d like to know that I’ve managed to eliminate about forty percent of our paper usage in the past year, and I’m a good eight percent ahead of my annual goal already.”
“You’re amazing. Are you sure you’re not a superhero?”
“Nope. Just damn good at what I do. I’ve pre-filled out the reviews and added a page of comments for each one with my recommendations.” She set the stack of folders on Sally’s desk. “Use or ignore them as you wish. You’re the boss. But if you use them, you should probably put them into your own words.” She winked. “Juice will know it was me.”
Juice was Sally’s boss. He’d been in charge of the Parahuman Resources Agency since 2006, and had quietly managed to become one of the most powerful politicians in the country. He would argue the point, of course, and he’d likely win because he was the best lawyer Sally had ever seen. Still, he had at his fingertips the ability to summon and direct the total power of America’s strategic parahuman resources. Unlike the United States Armed Forces, the PRA could act solely on the orders of the President. Juice took his authority seriously, though, and Sally knew he’d never buck the President without a very good reason. On the other hand, as Jack had once told her, it’s much easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission. Knowing she had that kind of support system behind her made it a little easier to be the team commander of the most important branch of Just Cause in the country.
She spread the folders out on her desk and looked at the names, feeling like more than half of them were strangers to her. JCNY had acquired a few recent graduates from the Hero Academy, and they all seemed so ridiculously young to her. Had she ever been such a gawky teen herself? She liked to tell herself of course she hadn’t.
She liked to tell herself lots of things that she didn’t always believe. Her eyes fell upon Jason’s folder, simply entitled Mastiff, and a wave of guilt washed over her. He wasn’t even in headquarters. He’d been spending a lot of time in a studio in Manhattan, working as a producer for an up-and-coming group of young rockers with hipster beards and man buns. She’d granted him the extra time off. He didn’t seem very interested in being a superhero anymore, and she suspected he might be the next one to retire from the life while he still had much of his left. Maybe if he did choose that path, he’d get back into music full time. Maybe he’d get too busy to think about becoming a parent for awhile. Maybe he and Sally would get through their rocky stage.
And if not, well, perhaps she’d look into Plan B, or more accurately, Plan March.
She’d met March a couple of years back when she’d returned an owed favor to Harlan Washington, the Destroyer. March was his nephew, conceived in an act of violence, raised by a sociopath, and still somehow turned out to be a pretty nice young man. Sally hadn’t meant to be attracted to him. She certainly hadn’t meant to get . . . involved with him. And yet, the attraction was undeniable, and even though they’d barely acted upon it since, it was always there in the back of her mind like a familiar song. She hated to think she might turn out like her mother, but perhaps the apple truly didn’t fall far from the tree. Sally had thought for most of her life that her long-dead father was Audio, her mother’s husband and a member of Just Cause back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. The truth was her father was the equally long-dead Lionheart, another Just Cause member and her mother’s side thing.
The more difficult things became between her and Jason, the more she considered reaching out and making that call to March, just to let off a little steam.
God, maybe she was turning into her mother.
Fort Justice
New York Bay
Minerva floated high above the floor of the The Tank and watched a man made of metal put the newest Just Cause members through their paces. The Tank was the unofficial name for Just Cause New York’s Combat Simulation Chamber, a heavily armored and reinforced room inside one of the legs that supported the repurposed oil rig. What it lacked in square footage, it more than made up for in sheer volume. Nearly a hundred feet separated the chamber’s floor from the roof, and the CSC technicians spent a lot of time configuring it to resemble skyscrapers, that being one of the most common terrains in the Greater New York area. Stockpiles of raw materials filled tanks in the platform’s other legs, which became building blocks for the tiny nanotech robots that built the various settings molecule by molecule. The technicians likened it to working with LEGO elements, or Minecraft.
The metal man’s name was Hector, and he was a former Champion, a former convict, but still an asshole even after years of working with Just Cause. Sally had befriended him when she went undercover with the Champions and Minerva knew she had covered for the murder he had committed. She never said anything about her knowledge, because it wasn’t her story to share. The man Hector had killed intended grievous harm to the world, and in Minerva’s opinion, the world was a better place thanks to him. Thus, she tolerated the near abuses of the young heroes as they tried to translate the directions mixed into his unending stream of profanity.
“Come on, you sorry-ass bitches. That’s the best you got? When you out in the field, ain’t nobody gonna do ballet dancing with you. They gonna try to kill your asses. You got to know what it is to get fuckin’ hit. Really fuckin’ hit. You got to know you can take that shit and still come back fightin’.”
“That’s easy for you to say, metal man,” said the young man called Spray. He stood in a puddle and water coalesced out of the air upon his skin, giving him a perpetual damp sheen. “Nothing can hurt you.”
It was a brave statement, but Minerva could smell the stink of fear rising off Spray like a cloud of steam. Her senses were her greatest gift, and she could learn more about someone from their scent than a detective could in a half hour of conversation. She drifted a little lower, still watching, waiting to see how Hector would react to the challenge.
She wasn’t disappointed. The silvery color of his skin darkened to a more natural skin tone, tattoos on his arms and torso and face becoming visible as the nickel from which he took his name vanished. “You think so, huh?” He took a threatening step toward Spray. Then another.
“What are you doing?” Spray took a step back. Water started to run down his skin, dripping off him like he was standing in a shower. It was a fascinating ability, and Minerva had never seen anything like it before.
Hector got right into Spray’s face and pushed him. “Stop me, fucker.”
“Q-quit it!” Spray backed off. Clouds of water vapor swirled around him and his skin seemed to be swelling, absorbing the ambient humidity. The entire CSC transformed from a sweaty, humid metal tank to an oven. The simple act of removing the water from the air raised the temperature several degrees.
“Make me.” Hector pushed him again.
“Hey, cut it out, dude. This isn’t how we’re supposed to train.” Chinook flew over to him, gossamer gold and white silks swirling around her like clouds in her winds.
“Make me,” Hector repeated. He shoved Spray hard enough to make the young man trip over his own feet. He fell backwards with a splash as if he’d landed in a wading pool. “Come on. You gonna let me do that to you? You’re a fucking superhero. Don’t take that shit. I ain’t nobody, understand? I ain’t a fucking supervillain. I’m just some piece of shit asshole on the street who ain’t gonna take a knee because you got a badge.” He made as if to kick Spray while he was down.
“That’s it, you’re done,” shouted Chinook, and she fired an invisible blast of high-pressure air at Hector.
“No, wait!” cried Jackdaw, who was flying around in ineffectual circles.
Hector sprang clear of Chinook’s blast, letting it catch Amber full force. The young elementalist shrieked as the wind sent her flying. She barely managed to create a ramp of pure amber to turn what would have been a nasty impact into a sliding deceleration.
Chinook gaped in astonishment at the effect of her wind blast, allowing Hector to grab onto one of her ankles. He swung her around like an Olympic hammer thrower and sent her careening toward one of the walls.
“Dammit!” yelled Spray, and a jet of water erupted from him like someone had broken open a fire hose.
The stream caught Hector in the chest, but instead of letting it fling him back, he crouched down, leaning into the stream, and fought through it toward Spray.
Jackdaw hovered in midair, flapping his wings like a bird of prey ready to dive onto a small rodent, and emitted a sonic cry powerful enough to give Minerva an instant headache.
Blood streamed from Hector’s ears as he took the full brunt of Jackdaw’s shriek, but he still managed to angle his arms to deflect Spray’s water jet right into the diminutive winged parahuman. Jackdaw’s cry became a choking cough and he crashed to the floor, wings too sodden to fly.
Hector dove beneath the water cannon and swept Spray’s legs out from under him. Spray went down hard, and would have hit his head on the floor had Hector not slipped one sly hand beneath it to deflect what would likely have caused a concussion. Minerva noted the move and nodded in silent approval. Despite his rough training methods, Hector’s willingness to hurt the trainees didn’t extend to permanent damage, and he was an expert at preventing it. Trainees would have bumps and bruises, aches and pains, and in the end, they would learn some real fighting skills instead of the phony ritualized parahuman combat taught at the Hero Academy.
Minerva had seen Hector train four years’ worth of Academy graduates in the Tank, and every one of them had become a fearsome Warrior in his or her own right, understanding their powers and how to use them to maximum effect in combat situations. Hector rightly pointed out time and time again that honor was fuckin’ stupid and graveyards were full of honorable assholes. If you can take your opponent down with a cheap shot, he said, you’re a dumbshit if you don’t. You’ll be alive and maybe the next asshole will think twice about engaging you.
It had all the tact of a beer mug to the back of the head, but Sally trusted Hector completely, and Minerva respected her team leader’s judgment.
Still, Hector’s stream of invective was enough to make her ears burn as he dressed down what he called failures of the Zero Academy for not having the slightest bit of goddamn sense, letting a single man best four parahumans without using a single ability of his own.
“They really hate him,” said the familiar voice of her love, Ment. She turned to see him watching from one of the observation galleries high up on the wall of the Tank. He had dispensed with his long black overcoat but still wore black jeans and a t-shirt as he looked down upon the trainees.
Minerva flew across the chamber to perch on the railing of the gallery beside him. “It’s a good thing. It will help them to work as a team if they see a common enemy.”
“Sounds like Academy-level bullshit to me.” Ment had little respect for the Hero Academy, feeling it had as much in common with real superhero work as watching a video about nuclear power prepared one to take charge of a reactor. “Seems like every year the graduates get less prepared for the real world.” He rested his elbows on the railing. “Is the Academy getting soft or is it the kids themselves?”
“Neither,” said Minerva. “The world is getting harder.”
“Well, they better toughen up before something really hard happens.”
NYPD Explorers Seminar
Manhattan
The first part of the seminar was the easy one. They’d set up outside the old Arsenal in Central Park and bused in a load of NYPD Explorers, kids who were still in high school and thought they might like to become police officers. Penny Lane donned her Just Cause gear for the occasion of trying to sell law enforcement as a career to the cynical children of the Big Apple, who’d already seen everything by the time they were three. Her tactical outfit for Just Cause was almost identical to the one she’d worn for three years as a Special Weapons and Tactics officer for the NYPD and then later as a Champion once her parahuman ability—such as it was—had become apparent. The only difference was it fit better, as Just Cause had its own tailors who were well-versed in fitting unusual outfits to people with unusual proportions.
Penny, being short and stocky, was less of a challenge than some of the mesomorphs with the overactive pituitary glands on the team, like Mastiff or Detroit Steel. The first time she’d tried on a pair of combat boots that had been designed based upon 3-D scans of her feet, she’d almost broken out in tears because they were so comfortable. Her years in the NYPD had been plagued by athlete’s foot thanks to always needing three pairs of socks to get her tiny feet into the smallest boots available for the department.
Unlike the NYPD, Just Cause didn’t require her to wear a helmet on duty, which made it a lot easier for her to use her powers. The heavy armored helmets favored by SWAT officers threw off her sense of balance and distance, and made her much less accurate in her shots. Even so, she’d still achieved top marks and become one of the very few elite women to achieve the sniper rating in the NYPD. Her inspiration was the WWII Soviet sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko. Nobody knew whether or not Pavlichenko had a parahuman ability, but Penny’s was well-documented, and the first part of the seminar involved a lot of her demonstrating that ability.
It really wasn’t much of a power, as far as parahuman abilities went. On the Devereaux Distribution, which ranked parahumans on a 9-point scale, she was barely a 1. In all honesty, she shouldn’t rightly have been called anything better than a really good shot, but her genes spoke otherwise. The higher-ups in the Just Cause organization liked to point to her as a success story, showing that a minor league Champion could eventually earn a call-up to the Big Time if they worked hard enough. She knew the truth, though, and it galled her.
She was perhaps the world’s first superhero who got her position thanks to parahuman affirmative action.
She had her gear with her, of course, including the rifle she’d named Mila after the Russian legend. The Explorers got to look at all her gear up close, and even got to take turns holding some of the lesser weapons. Nobody laid a finger on Mila, though. After showing off the equipment of a NYPD SWAT officer came the demonstrations. Since it was Central Park in late Spring, they couldn’t let Penny go around popping off shots left and right, even though with her abilities a miss was as unlikely as a misfire. It only took one mistake, one moment of distraction, and someone could get hurt or killed.
So instead, Penny had two fifty-cent rolls of pennies, and she proceeded to flip them through the air at various targets. Nobody had been able to come up with a glib name for her ability. Super-sniping came close, but sounded stupid. The scientists at the Musashi Institute for Parahuman Research confirmed her power was a form of telekinesis, but she preferred the phrase her firearms instructor had coined after she’d made ten improbable or impossible shots in a row.
She made her targets want to get hit.
She launched pennies through the air, dropping them neatly into Explorers’ breast pockets, or igniting a match one held. She ricocheted them off rocks and trees to strike targets she couldn’t see directly. Five pennies in a row lodged themselves in a crack in the Arsenal’s mortar, each one touching the edge of the previous one. The Explorers went from polite applause to cheers and shouts of approval as she successfully completed trick shot after trick shot. She saved the last ten cents for special requests and managed to fulfill all ten of those suggested by the Explorers, including popping open one’s hair barrette and intersecting the intermittent spray of a sprinkler to deflect the water at another Explorer.
Penny could have gone on for the rest of the scheduled time of the seminar just throwing pennies, but the second half of the hour was reserved for a question and answer session. She dreaded those because she would inevitably say something impolitic. Her lack of a filter was one of the main reasons she hadn’t started out right in Just Cause, but instead went to a Champions team first. Just Cause management didn’t think she had the right mindset to represent the world’s premiere superhero team and could use some tempering in the Champions.
The eventual promotion came after longtime hero Crackerjack retired and Just Cause New York found itself without a tactical specialist. Somebody suggested that lady sniper in the Champions and the next thing Penny knew, she’d received her call-up to The Show.
Unfortunately, that call became the final straw in her failing marriage. Her husband, tired of her unavailability, her short temper when she was around, and with his eyes wandering to someone more suited to trophy status than Penny, filed for divorce. That wasn’t as devastating a blow as it could have been. Penny hadn’t felt the marriage was particularly successful, although she’d done her best to abide by the vows she’d spoken seven years earlier. It hadn’t taken long for her to realize that maybe marriage wasn’t for her.
If it wasn’t for Avery, she’d have signed the papers and walked away without a look back.
Avery was her son and the single bright spot from her marriage with Edward. He was a bright-eyed, inquisitive four-year-old boy with perpetually tousled blonde hair and a face like an angel. She lavished what love she could upon him even while harboring the secret guilt that she’d let herself get pregnant in the hope it would bring her and Edward closer together. Her intent had backfired and Edward was suing for full custody. It was bad enough for her to have been a NYPD officer, but once she’d become a Champion and then part of Just Cause, he felt it was inappropriate for a young boy to be raised by surrogates in a dangerous environment.
They’d had some terrible fights about it, mostly along the lines of how can you do this to Avery? What happens if he’s at Fort Justice when someone attacks it? Her attorney had said things didn’t look good and she should prepare herself for limited visitation at best. “You’re in a high-risk occupation, in an environment filled with dangerously powerful people,” said the bespectacled young man who looked like he’d stepped out of a hundred-year-old book. “The current political climate is leaning anti-parahuman, thanks to people like Senator Goodwin. Your ex has a six-figure income, a house in a quiet neighborhood in Staten Island with good schools.”
“But he’s an asshole,” Penny had argued.
The look on her attorney’s face had been so clear he hadn’t needed to say any words. And so are you.
The Explorers began asking questions and Penny did her best to answer them. What was it like being on Just Cause? Exciting, and interesting. How had it been different for her as a woman going through SWAT training? She didn’t pay attention to it as she was more focused upon passing the tests with exceptional marks. How had it affected her personal life?
Boom, there it was. Every police officer was asked the same question or some variation of it. People assumed cops got divorced at a much higher rate than other people. The implicit explanation was cops didn’t get along with others and it colored all their social interactions. Research had proved otherwise, but people were more interested in things that sounded right than actual boring facts. Penny could have discussed it at length with the Explorers, telling them how hard it was to find someone who understood the kind of things that cops had to deal with on a daily basis, someone who could accept the long hours, the sudden emergencies, the risks. Instead, she did what she always did, because in the end her attorney had been absolutely right about thinking she was an asshole.
She lied.
Axeship Blood Afire
Sharassar Battleclan
The announcement came over the ship’s loudspeakers while Garragh was honing his spare axe. The warp bubble would decay in half a twelfth and the Battleclan would emerge into real space within striking distance of the target world. The news energized many of his fellow Warriors, but Garragh kept his attention tightly focused upon the blade of his axe, checking it with his claws for any minute imperfection along the tungsten edge. A passing companion would see nothing but a Warrior’s patience and attention to the detail, which was right and honorable.
Nobody would see Garragh’s fear.
In truth, he was afraid. In the basic schooling all Warriors received, he had learned how his people had tamed the steppes and hills of Hindraa, and how the roving bands of hunters had eventually become the powerful matriarchal Clans of the Hind. The Clanmistresses had warred with each other, battling first for resources, then for territory, and later for the honor of defeating one’s opponents. Lesser Clans perished beneath the axe blades of the more powerful until only half a twelfth of Clans remained with the world divided between them. Each Clan was as the finger of a clenched fist, and Sharassar was the thumb that connected them all.
When the Hind took to space for the first time, it was with a Sharassar Submistress in command, even though all the Clans had pooled their resources to build the warp generators that hurled them across the reaches of space. They spread through the systems, first as explorers, then as conquerors.
Fighting between the Clans had become a waste of finite resources, of trained Warriors when there were hundreds of worlds waiting to be ground beneath the rear legs of the Hind. The Clanmistresses reached an arrangement, known as the Accord of the Fist. They would continue to battle and compete, but the battlegrounds would be against those lesser races. The power of the Clans would lie in those they had conquered, those who had prostrated themselves and sworn allegiance to the Clanmistresses.
Defeating an enemy was simple when one had warp technology. The activation of a warp field within the gravity well of a planet was sufficient to break that planet into pieces. Impressive? Certainly. Honorable? Not in the least. Power came from control. To destroy a world was a failure, and resulted in loss of face among the Clans. Lose too much face, and a Clan risked a coup by those Submistresses who couldn’t stand the dishonor. It was better to die in a foolish attempt to gain control of a failing clan than to live under the darkness of dishonor.
Conquering an opponent was infinitely preferable. If said opponent surrendered without battle when confronted by the obvious superiority of the Hind, it was a great victory, and the Clan of record would rise in the hierarchy of the Accord of the Fist. However, if the opponent fought tooth and claw and the Hind prevailed, it was the sweetest win of all, and all the Clans would heap accolades upon the victor.
Clan Sharassar had conquered three worlds, two of which they had beaten in open war. It was the most of any of the Clans, and made Sharassar the most powerful of all. The Clanmistress was unwilling to sit back on her haunches and enjoy the fruits of her power, so she ordered her Axeships out to seek new worlds to conquer.
That was why Garragh was crammed onto the barracks deck with twelve twelfths of other Hind Warriors. They were the chosen weapons of Clan Sharassar, ordered to bring war upon the talking primates of the blue-white planet that was their goal.
And he was afraid.
Fear was a response of lesser beings. Hind were supposed to be immune to such weakness. What else could it be that made him have to clench his hands tightly about the haft of his axe to keep them from shaking? That turned his insides to broth? That made all four of his feet as heavy as tungsten?
Warriors weren’t bred for their intelligence as much as they were for size and strength. Garragh wasn’t the smartest, but he knew enough to operate a databox, and he had researched fear among some of the lesser races. The Submistresses who collated data had studied the lesser races extensively. Reading their reports took time and effort, but Garragh could only spend so many twelfths honing his axes until the sheer mindlessness made him want to start a fight simply for the variety. If anyone had asked what he was doing at the databox, he’d have told them he was learning to recognize fear in lesser races so he would know when their morale was broken. It was a good lie, and he would have been proud of it had it not been so painfully false.
One fellow Warrior had actually asked him about it once and Garragh had delivered his lie with the careful practice of many twelfths of study. The other Warrior licked his chops and said that kind of initiative was bound to get Garragh noticed by the Deck Submistress, and perhaps he would get called into her quarters to perform congress with her. She had taken several other Warriors over the many cycles of their warp voyage, and to a man they had all returned to the barracks exhausted, bleeding from numerous gashes in their sides where she had raked them.
Garragh rather hoped he wouldn’t be called for that reward.
At the announcement, the Warriors scurried about the barracks floor, stowing the accumulated pads and detritus of a long voyage. They checked the charges on their electrolasers, on their wrist shields, and most importantly, the edges on their axes. Two Warriors became so excited at the upcoming war that they set upon each other, bucking up onto their rear legs to rake with their forelegs as they punched and slashed with their muscular arms.
The other Warriors surrounded them, roaring approval as their orange blood splattered about the deck. The bloodlust ran high and even Garragh fell victim to its sway. He began to see his fellow soldiers as potential targets and gripped his axe even tighter as he yowled at the two combatants.
A piercing electronic whistle rent the air at a painful frequency and volume, making even the two battling Hind drop their axes to cover their ears. The Deck Submistress loped into the middle of the group and surveyed the result of her handiwork as she put away the calmer. “War is coming, and your time is nearly upon you, but this fighting your brethren is unbecoming of Sharassar. Let the lesser Clans gnaw upon each other for scraps even as we climb atop their broken corpses. We are the Thumb in the Accord of the Fist, and we will see the universe prostrate before us.” She dropped her voice to a low purr. “And the talking Monkeys will be the next to kneel with our axes against their throats.”
A hundred Hind Warriors shouted in joy, their axes held high over their heads. “Sharassar! Accord of the Fist!”
Garragh, too, raised his axe, but his hearts weren’t in it.
The Preserve
Luna
Harlan sealed the chest plastron of his project and stood back from the workbench. He’d spent years building replicas of the two androids he’d encountered in his time on the Earth. At first, it had been in order to have something to do with his hands, to keep his engineering senses sharp while his self-replicating and self-repairing machines did the real work of building and maintaining his secret Moon base. Then later, the project had almost become something else. It was a retreat to a simpler time, where he could envision a device and then create it from the parts he had available.
When he’d grown up in Harlem, he spent as many hours as he could in the junkyard at one end of the neighborhood, building fantastic devices and culminating in his first Destroyer suit, the one Just Cause had destroyed back in 1977. He debuted his second suit eight years later, when he took his revenge upon Just Cause in what the news media of the time called the single greatest parahuman tragedy.
His third suit was a brief foray into micro-electronics, and he tested it first against the Lucky Seven and later against Just Cause in Guatemala. Mustang Sally destroyed that suit with no regard for her own life. He had hated her for it, oh yes. He had dreamed of all the ways he would crush the life from that crimson and gold suit.
Time marched on, though, and his hatred lessened to a dull roar. Perhaps it was a side effect of getting older, or perhaps it was being entrusted with raising his nephew after the attack upon his sister left her in a coma for two decades. When Mustang Sally contacted him in 2007, she had needed his technical expertise, and he’d given it in trade for a favor. She fulfilled that favor two years later when she helped free his sister’s mind from her comatose prison.
Harlan Washington, the Destroyer, had found himself without anyone left to hate. The Just Cause he’d detested was full of heroes he no longer recognized. Somehow, he had made his peace with Mustang Sally, and found a respect for her he didn’t fully understand. He almost felt protective of her, and proud, like an estranged father watching his child succeed. She would never love him, certainly, and he would never ask for such a thing knowing he deserved nothing more than her contempt. And yet, her selfless effort to save his sister had awakened feelings he’d spent his whole life suppressing.
So he’d turned to tinkering, the way a suburban dad might escape to the garage to work on a project car that might take years to make operational. It was less about the completion of the project than it was about the meditation upon it, the way one sat and looked at the pieces, drinking a beer and nodding occasionally as if to say someday, it’ll all come together, but there’s no hurry.
If it came right down to it, he knew he could finish both his Steel Soldier and his Carousel creations with less than an hour of work between the two, but again, it was less about the completion of the project than it was the awareness of its existence that mattered most to Harlan.
An insistent buzzing in his forearm pulled him away from his thoughts. His body was suffused with millions of microscopic nanites of his own design, replacing his previous high-tech external armor with armor that was with him always. Additionally, it provided him a full suite of sensors that otherwise would have required an inconveniently large van to follow him around at all times.
He touched his fingertips together, then spread them out. A translucent membrane spread between them, framed by his forefingers and thumbs. Data streamed across the membrane, culminating in an impossible declaration. He concentrated for a moment and the membrane pulled itself back within his body. “March,” he said aloud.
“Yes, Uncle?” the voice of his nephew sounded within his ears.
“Meet me in the Control Room. Now.”
“On m-my way.”
Harlan raced through the corridors of the Preserve, reaching the Control Room in less than a minute. At a single unspoken word of command, a stainless steel bowl filled with a signal-conducting gelatin extended to reach him on an articulated arm. He plunged one hand into the gel and at that moment became one with the Preserve. Its antennae and telescopes were his eyes and ears, its power couplings his lifeblood, its supercomputer his brain. The Preserve’s sensors repeated what his own body had told him only moments before.
Five objects had appeared in the space between the Earth and the Moon. One moment they were absent and the next they were present, their appearance heralded by a shimmering rainbow that ran across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. More data flooded in. They emitted far more energy than any natural object, and as sunlight glinted off them, they showed hard edges and angles that spoke of manufacture by hands that were not human.
March burst into the Control Room. “W-what is it?”
“Aliens.” Harlan issued a series of commands via the gel that he’d never thought he would have to use.
“Aliens? You’ve g-g-got to be kidding.”
Harlan brought the main screen to life and replayed the ships’ arrival for his nephew. “It’s an attack.”
“Why an attack?”
“Those ships are massive. Each one is almost a kilometer long. That’s three times as big as an aircraft carrier. You don’t expend those kinds of resources for a peaceful first contact scenario. This is a show of strength.”
“But, Uncle—”
Harlan whirled to face his nephew. “They have FTL technology. Faster than light. Do you realize what that means? It’s like five fully armed modern battleships appearing off the coast of the Bahamas in 1492.” Even as he spoke, he continued directing the resources of the Preserve, preparing for its defense. “You can’t stay here. If they detect us, they will wipe us off the face of the Moon.”
“N-no, I want to stay.”
Harlan allowed one sad smile to cross his lips. “I’m sorry, March.”
March had the same nanotech inside him that Harlan had. It was a precaution against the dangers of living in a fragile habitat surrounded by airless vacuum. Harlan gave it specific directions. March moved across the floor in a jerking, off-balance fashion as the nanotech overrode his musculature. “No! Stop! Uncle, p-please!”
“Go to Just Cause. To Minerva, or to Sally. They will keep you safe. I can’t trust anyone else.”
“Uncle!” March fought against his own body but to no avail. He left the Control Room. Harlan monitored his progress all the way to the emergency escape rocket. He’d already programmed the destination and if the rocket survived all the way to Earth, March would be safe.
Harlan intended to be enough of a distraction to keep the aliens busy until that point.
He stalked toward the airlock, his nanotech armor pushing itself out through his pores and forming into blue and red armor that could protect him from the worst that a conventional military or parahuman attack force could dish out. He didn’t know what kind of weaponry the aliens would have brought with them, but he suspected he would be sorely tested against it.
The visor grew into place before his face and illuminated with data, targeting reticules, sensor information, power usage meters. Everything was nominal. The airlock door closed behind him and a moment later, Harlan stepped out onto the deck. The walls of the crater rose all around him, black as the sky above, illuminated briefly by the flash of the rocket engine as March’s escape pod launched toward Earth.
Harlan ordered the Preserve to power down into standby mode in the hope that it might avoid detection by the aliens. He triggered his boot thrusters and broke away from the Moon’s hold upon him. Without atmosphere to slow him down, the velocity of his super-efficient engines reached triple, then quadruple digits in seconds. He arced up and away from dark side, pouring on the speed as the great blue disc of Earth appeared over the horizon, and in between him and the world of his birth, five alien starships lurked. He focused on them with his best magnification and confirmed his worst fear. Bays were opening all along the flanks of the warships and smaller ships were emerging from them and moving into a formation. “Just once I would have liked to be wrong,” he muttered, and triggered a command to his suit.
His suit established a connection to an innocuous satellite purportedly of the GPS variety but actually a top secret United States military communications satellite. He overrode the onboard security like it wasn’t even there and sent out a transmission that would break into all groundside communications.
“People of Earth, this is Harlan Washington, also known as Destroyer. An alien attack is imminent. Prepare to defend yourselves.”
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