Thrusts of Justice (Chooseomatic Books), page 13
“I’ll catch up!” says Conrad, hurrying back to the wreckage of the jet. You start trudging toward the tower, but the icy terrain makes foot travel difficult. Also, more Guardians have noticed your presence. Octavia is steeling herself for another attack when you hear the sounds of metal scraping against metal. You turn to see huge sections of the jet tearing away from the body and reshaping into something new.
“The computer systems are all dead,” Conrad shouts from inside. “This thing is mine now! Jet propulsion is shot, too, but this’ll do.” The wreckage shudders violently and stands up on two legs. “I made seats for you on top!” Conrad extends the craft’s crude metal forelimb and you climb aboard. You had no idea he wielded that kind of power!
Another Guardian is upon you, but Conrad bats it out of the sky with his makeshift battlebot and stomps on it when it hits the ground. He starts tromping toward the tower at a good clip. Octavia takes out another bogey with a mind blast, and Tina rockets around you in a wide arc, providing air support. You’ve covered half a mile in no time. Three quarters of a mile! You’re going to make it!
That’s when you spot a huge, man-shaped Guardian fly up with some kind of glowing orb. “He’s human!” Octavia says. “Damn it — I can’t read his thoughts. I’ve lost the psychic link! Look out!”
You hear Tina howl, and she falls from her chair, plummeting to the earth below. The craft buckles beneath you. “I’m losing it!” Conrad shrieks. The entire thing lurches forward in a final push, flattening the Guardian and hurtling you forward to the tower. You hit the ground hard, just a few feet short.
There’s no time to check on your companions. You drag your frozen, bloody body to the base of the structure and lay yourself flat against it. Do it! you think. You’re not sure if there’s a mental component to the virus transfer, but you’re going to give it all you’ve got. You wanted the Earth, you bastards? Take it! CHOKE ON THE HUMANITY!
You feel the life flow out of your body. As you lose consciousness, you’re certain you’ll never know if your last-ditch effort to save the planet worked.
* * * * *
It totally did!
You awaken in a hospital bed, with a fully armored Cosmic Guardian standing over you. Its visor splits in two to reveal a familiar face underneath.
“Dale? You’re the… wait, what?”
“Melah’s here, too,” he says. His voice has an odd, mechanical quality — it’s definitely Dale, but somehow he seems like something more than just himself.
“All kinds of crazy stuff went down after we got separated in Cleveland,” Melah says. She’s covered from the neck down in some kind of purple goo. “But you did it! You and Magnifica and the others. We were battling decoy villains — heroes, too, they all kind of joined together — but you guys figured it out and stopped the whole planet-wide alien mutation plot.”
“Oh,” Dale says, tossing your Nightwatchman gloves and goggles onto your lap. “I fixed your gear for you.” Dale and Melah found your group at the South Pole just in time to save the lives of you and your crew, and Dale used his suit’s technology to disengage you from the bomb. The alien mothership is still in orbit, though, and most of the world’s superpowered beings seem to be rampaging out of control.
This looks like a job for a superhero.
THE END
150
Ten fannish, squee-filled minutes later you’re in the air, rocketing toward southern Florida at Mach 3. You sift through your computer’s enormous contact list en route, trying to figure out just who in Broward County comes so highly recommended. Each entry seems to include a note that says “Don’t trust,” so you sort the database by that criteria. This results in 17,852 untrustables, about 20 or 30 “maybes” (you’re surprised to see The Ox show up on this list, and note the conspicuous absence of one Nancy North), and a lone, solitary “trust.”
That would be Magnifica. The world’s greatest hero.
She was, anyway, before she disappeared from the public eye about 15 years ago. That would explain the retirement community that pops up on your plane’s radar when you plug in her name. Your suit has a miniature version of the same cloaking gear that keeps the plane undetected (neat!) so sneaking into a Florida rest home shouldn’t prove much of a challenge.
The jet lands silently inside the facility’s grounds (it’s a really cool plane). As you climb out of the cockpit, you find an elderly woman in flannel pajamas waiting for you. She’s leaning on a walker, and must be pushing 70.
“You ain’t the Nightwatchman,” she says plainly.
This catches you off guard. Magnifica? “I’m his protégé,” you say. “He’s… training me. You know, to take over for him.” That sounded lame, even to you.
“Uh-huh.” Her voice reminds you of the old lady who used to drive your school bus in the third grade (she smoked three packs a day and terrified every kid on her route). You get a better look once you’re on the ground, and now you’re sure of it. This is the mightiest hero who ever lived.
“Did the Nightwatchman tell you I could crush your skull like a goddamn grape?” she asks. “Get the hell offa my lawn.”
“Magnifica, I need your help,” you say. “It’s Reginald Thorpe, and it’s serious.” She had tangled with every supervillain in the phone book back in her day, but Thorpe was something of an arch-nemesis. “Brain Stem is already dead.”
She pauses, still glaring. “Brain Stem was a pissant. You’re a pissant. And I’m retired, so I’m telling you the same thing I told Tachyon the other day. Which is bite me.”
Tachyon was a time-traveling contemporary of Magnifica and a fellow member of the Liberty Patrol, the superpowered team from the ’70s and ’80s that predated the Justice Squadron. According to your files, he’s also been in a coma for years. “Um, Tachyon was here?” you ask gently.
“Yeah. Looked the same as he did in the ’70s, though, so it mighta been a version from back then. You never can tell with that little twerp. But at least he just wanted to chitchat about the glory years, and didn’t have the balls to ask me for a goddamn favor.”
Has Magnifica really been entertaining visitors from her past? Or has the world’s greatest hero gone completely senile? She does look to be a good stretch past her prime — that walker is especially troubling. If she really is the only person you can trust, though, your options are limited.
▶ If you try to talk Magnifica into helping you, click here for page 258.
▶ If you decide to look elsewhere for aid, click here for page 72.
152
You pause to consider the life you’ll be turning your back on if you bond permanently with the space armor. Mostly, it’s thoughts of waking up at eleven and having gin for breakfast with the ranks of the unemployed. You are so ready for this.
Octavia puts both hands on your helmet, and suddenly you can feel her presence inside your head. She says that you were never meant to be alone — that your past will always be part of who you are, but right now lives are at stake, and it’s time to look toward the future and begin the next chapter. She’s talking to the armor, of course.
Slowly, the now-familiar alien presence in your mind swells. This is no longer the tinny, distant voice of the ’50s radio announcer. It’s vast and intimidating. Its presence dwarfs your own, and you realize that it could easily swallow your psyche whole. But it doesn’t want that. It’s reaching out, making you an offer. Gingerly — almost timidly — waiting to see if you’ll accept.
You do. An odd sensation washes over you, and along with it comes a rush of memories… .
Your primary mission was reconnaissance. The creatures of Earth had a complex social order, so it was important to find a suitable host. You found Sten Jannsen, a prime physical specimen whose Olympic victories had earned him a great deal of local celebrity in the city of your initial landing, which by random chance was Stockholm, Sweden.
Your secondary mission was assassination. The alien being known as Dogstar, the Savior from Sirius, didn’t stand a chance.
Your long-term objective was more complicated. You joined forces with Earth’s heroes, becoming a member of the aging Liberty Patrol, and later helping to form the Justice Squadron. With them, you saved many lives, but this was not part of your ongoing goal. You discovered that you could get anything you required by giving human beings what they wanted most. Those who wanted a hero got you as their champion. Others with more selfish desires had them fulfilled as well, because none of it mattered to you. Reginald Thorpe’s hunger for power made him the perfect pawn, and you started feeding him a very specific set of instructions. Everything was proceeding as planned.
The time frame, however, presented a problem. You would need at least a decade to put all the pieces in place, and Jannsen’s psyche would never last that long. The bonding process was designed to give you access to your host’s physical body and higher functions, but your alien physiology was essentially incompatible. Your psyche was starting to drive Jannsen mad, but to properly function in society you needed his mind intact. So you improvised. You found a way to balance your intellect with Jannsen’s in a kind of merged partnership. Nothing of the kind had ever been done before — you still had your memories and your mission, but now he was as much a part of you as you were of him.
Over the years, you discovered that Sten Jannsen was a remarkable man. Not tremendously bright, but selfless, generous and kind. All he ever wanted was to help others. In fact, the most difficult part was to keep him from betraying your true mission — before your minds became one, you had kept him in the dark with the help of Thorpe’s memory-erasing machine. Afterward, his moral compass was kept in check — just barely — by the fact that he shared your own psyche, including the programming that told him there was no choice but to follow orders.
Eventually, once your plans were all in motion, it was time to return home. The portion of you that was still Jannsen would spend the interstellar journey in suspended animation, but the part that was self-aware biomechanical battle armor would not.
And nine years is a long time to think.
You remember reporting to your alien masters — their bloated, pustule-covered bodies and sheer malevolence repulsed you. They sent you back to Earth again, this time as a warrior. But you were more than that now. Part of their attack plan was to neutralize the biggest individual threats to the invasion by grafting battlesuits to them and turning them into more soldiers. So when a suit came for the indestructible human known as the Ox — encased in a ball of space rock — you did everything you could to stop it from reaching him. The Ox’s impenetrable hide makes him immune to all of the aliens’ weaponry — even when you managed to destroy the suit that was custom-designed for him, you knew they’d keep trying, tearing battlesuits off existing troops if necessary, to finish the job. But keeping him out of your masters’ hands for as long as possible seemed like humanity’s best hope.
Huge swaths of memory are just missing. For example, everyone knows the Cosmic Guardian had a plucky canine companion, but there’s absolutely no record of the little guy in your memory banks. And although you had complete awareness of the mission during your first visit to Earth, most of that is gone now. What were the instructions you gave Thorpe? You have a vague sense of leaving part of yourself behind when you left the planet.
Also, Sten’s death is still too painful for you to dwell on, but his last act was to sacrifice himself so you could go on to save Earth. He knew that his human self was dying but that his alien self could graft to a new host and continue to fight. The important thing was that the Cosmic Guard didn’t catch on to his betrayal.
Keep it secret. You may have blown that part already. And somehow Jannsen feels like only one piece of your grief. Was there something more? Could there have been a child?
The flash of memory has only taken a moment — Octavia is still with you, her hands on the helmet that is now also your head. You start to tell her about the alien invasion, but she stops you — she was in your mind, and saw everything. Unfortunately, though, as a foot soldier you have only snippets of the greater plan. Other Guardians might have other pieces. Should you open up a channel and connect with them? It’s dangerous, since it would give them access to your thoughts as well. Surely they already know about your betrayal — or do they? You remember Sten’s last words, and wonder if you should stay as far away from the Guard as possible.
How else can you learn how to stop the alien plot, though? If those villains attacking D.C. are part of this, you might be able to beat something out of one of them.
▶ If you open up communications with your fellow Guardians, click here for page 271.
▶ If you think that’s a bad idea and head out for D.C., click here for page 88.
156
You’ve read enough comic books to know what happens if you shirk your responsibilities here: that bike thief kills your Uncle Ben, and then you have to be the type of superhero with crippling guilt issues lingering behind your lighthearted wisecracks. No, thanks. You’re going to get that damn bike back if it’s the last thing you do. Fortunately, it’s not terribly arduous. Once the thief realizes you’re after him, he jumps off the stolen bike and continues fleeing on foot. Well, that’s no fun. It’s probably bad form to punch him now, and you can’t imagine hauling someone in to the authorities for almost stealing a bicycle, so you let him go. By the time you return to the scene of the crime, the bike’s owner is nowhere to be found. Honestly, this really isn’t how you pictured big-city crimefighting.
“And what exactly do you think you’re doing with that bicycle?”
You turn to find Magnifico, leader of the Justice Squadron, floating slowly to the ground behind you, cape billowing majestically. You let out a gasp. It’s really him!
He cocks an eyebrow. “If that’s a homemade Skyhawk costume, it’s absolutely the worst one I’ve ever seen.”
Crap. Does he think you’re stealing the bike? And worse, does he think you’re cosplaying? Magnifico is probably the most famous superhero in the entire world, and so far you’re not making much of a first impression.
▶ If you tell him you’re a fellow hero who has just thwarted a bike robbery, click here for page 22.
▶ If you play it off like you’re just out for a walk and dressed weird, click here for page 201.
157
“You’re right,” Moretti says. “I am a dead man. The ships will be departing any time now, and I won’t be on them. I’ll suffer the same fate as the rest of this miserable world.”
Nancy’s face is unreadable. “And what fate do you imagine that to be?”
“Slow, agonizing death? Toiling away in slavery? It doesn’t matter. It’s a testament to Mr. Thorpe’s genius that he understood it so early on. Their technology dwarfs ours — they’ll take the planet for themselves and do with it as they see fit, and our only hope of survival is to join them. A select group of Crexidyne’s top brass will ride out the invasion in the safety of the alien mothership, and when it’s over, we’ll rule over whatever they choose to leave us with.”
“And the satellite weapon,” Nancy says. “I suppose that’s alien technology as well?”
“Oh no, we built that. At enormous cost, I might add.” He explains that the multi-billion dollar weapon was created to deal with a single loose thread — the Ox. Their experiments made him immensely strong and virtually invulnerable, with the unintended side effect of rendering him completely immune to alien weaponry. They couldn’t even use the aliens’ technology to remove his powers once he had them.
“The Orbital Death Laser is an unwieldy solution,” he says, “and it requires a tracking device implanted in his brain to target properly, but we finally built something that could kill the big son of a bitch. Fortunately, it proved unnecessary. Yesterday we slapped one of their Guardian battlesuits on him, and it worked like a charm. Now he’s just another mindless shock trooper.”
It still doesn’t make sense to you. “If these aliens are as powerful as you say, why would you need to build a superhuman army in the first place?”
Moretti shakes his head. “They’re a sideshow. It’s all they’ve ever been. Instead of developing any real defenses, humanity has looked toward their precious heroes to protect them, marvelling at their idiotic exploits while sitting on their couches, growing fat and content.
“And today will offer the biggest distraction of all,” he continues. “A coordinated, worldwide supervillain attack for the masses to gawk at, followed by the shock of betrayal when, instead of rushing to save them, their beloved heroes join in.”
“You’re in luck, Moretti,” Nancy says. “Now you’ve got front-row seats. If your little prophecy does come true, you’ll get to burn right along with the rest of us.”
“My dear Ms. North,” he says, his lips twisting into an unsettling grin. “You and I will burn much sooner than that. Do you remember my tiny friend, the cancer man? I built him a little home inside my coat so I can literally carry him around in my pocket. And while we’ve been sitting here talking, he’s been as busy as a bee.”
Something catches your eye across the room, and you turn to see a speck that quickly expands into a crooked man in a black uniform. He’s holding a shiny metal cylinder in one hand with his thumb pressed firmly against one end. You leap at him and knock the device out of his grasp before he shrinks back down out of sight, but you’re too late — the button has already been pushed.
Behind you, a column of orange light ten feet across erupts through the ceiling, burning through to the building’s foundation and completely disintegrating both Carlo Moretti and Nancy North.
