Thrusts of Justice (Chooseomatic Books), page 18
Nancy enters, and Moretti’s seething anger quickly turns to open rage. “You! I should have known. You’ve been a thorn in my side for far too long, North. You will burn. Do you understand me? Burn.”
It’s nice that non-superpowered scumbags can have arch-enemies as well, you think. And it makes sense that Nancy would be his — over the years, her investigations have surely cost Crexidyne billions. If Nancy is pleased to have gotten so far under his skin, though, it doesn’t show on her face. In fact, the icy steel of her gaze is mildly terrifying, even to you. “Why did Thorpe order Brain Stem’s murder?” she asks. It sounds more like a command than a question.
Moretti sneers. “Reginald Thorpe is a genius — his brilliance has long since transcended day-to-day operations. It’s my duty to interpret his visions and attempt to make them a reality. So that particular order came from me.”
“Tell me why.”
“Always focusing on the details,” he scoffs, “and missing the big picture staring you right in the face. The question isn’t why we killed him. It’s why we created him. Why we created any of them.”
Moretti tells you that every single human being to gain superpowers since the the mid-’80s — heroes and villains alike — has been the result of experiments conducted by Crexidyne. They would abduct strangers off the streets and strike a bargain: powers far beyond those of mortal men in exchange for loyalty to Thorpe, and a promise to help take over the world when the time came. The idea was that anyone willing to make such a bargain would suit Crexidyne’s purposes, and anyone unwilling had their memory of the incident erased and was given a dose of pancreatic cancer as a lovely parting gift.
“How do you give a person pancreatic cancer?” you ask. It may not be the most relevant detail, but the prospect of it horrifies you, and you just sort of blurt it out.
Moretti pauses, staring at you like you’re beneath his contempt. “We have a tiny little man who shrinks down and personally delivers it to your pancreas.” With all his talk of superpowers, you can’t be sure if he’s serious or if he’s just being a dick.
Nancy’s thoughts, however, are elsewhere. “You couldn’t possibly have kept all this a secret,” she says. “Someone would have talked.”
“Oh, we wiped the memories of the successful recruits as well — those who survived. We left them to their own devices. Some turned to crime, and the more narcissistic among them imagined themselves heroes, basking in the adoration of the masses. We were confident that eventually restoring memories of the bargain — and the knowledge that we could relieve them of their precious superpowers any time we chose — would keep them in line when the moment came.”
“So why kill Brain Stem?” Nancy demands. “Why now?”
“We always had the technology to mindwipe them,” Moretti answers, “but his psychic abilities made the process much simpler. However, the little bastard had… ambitions. So we kept erasing his memories and rebriefing him whenever we had need of his talents. Eventually the repeated wipes took a toll on his mind, and he became useless to us. But he kept using those damn powers to dig for his lost memories. Finally we had to activate one of our more reliable agents to put him down for good.”
Something about his story is bugging you. “He’s lying. Why would he even tell us all this if it were true?”
“Because it’s too late,” Nancy says. “He knows he’s already dead. I can see it in his eyes.”
Supervillains often spill every detail of their nefarious plots to heroes they have in their clutches, but you’re pretty sure the habit comes from an unconscious desire to fail, or just garden-variety stupidity. If Moretti truly has accomplished everything he’s claiming, he can’t possibly suffer from either of those. Is he stalling for time? Nancy, so close to answers she’s been seeking for decades, insists on continuing the interrogation.
▶ If you trust her judgment and hear Moretti out, click here for page 157.
▶ If you think you’re only playing into his hands and walk away, click here for page 242.
210
Really? You’ve come all this way, uncovered the alien plot, witnessed Nancy North’s untimely death, built a spaceship out of a supersonic jet, and when finally called upon to do something truly heroic, you opt instead to save your own skin? Seriously, we were so sure you’d make the other call we almost didn’t bother to put a choice in there.
And don’t give us that “I was just checking this page to see what would happen” business either — you were checking the cowardly route to see if you could get away with it. Guess what? You can’t. The mothership survives and throws a wave of 6,000 Cosmic Guardians at you, who disintegrate your jet on the spot. And don’t try flipping back to the previous page and choosing the other path, either. You go right back and start over at the beginning.
You go back, and you think about what you’ve done.
THE END
211
Do they think you stole Jannsen’s armor? “He totally gave it to me!” you shout through your loudspeaker. Then it occurs to you that they probably don’t even speak English. But your armor can translate! You tell it to explain what happened to the rest of the Guard.
You swell upward and you support, it says. You can’t actually determine if it’s speaking to the other Guardians or to you. Is assimilated this persona this duration completely, function immediately of verb the internal duration.
Translation: not your armor’s strongest suit. The blasts keep coming. Your visual display crackles back to life, so you use the opportunity to start your descent — you’re afraid their continued attacks will short out your suit completely, and if that happens, you’d rather not be 10,000 feet in the air. However, they appear to interpret your actions as a hostile maneuver. A Guardian charges you, smacking you with several tentacles, and you lose control, plunging toward solid ground. You’re cooperating, dammit! If they would give you some instructions, you’d be happy to comply. You start yelling commands to your battlesuit. “Open up a communications channel or something so I can talk to them!”
You right yourself just before impact, but then another Guardian slams you into the earth — your suit absorbs much of the impact, but it still knocks the wind out of you. You hear a click, finally receiving a transmission from your attackers.
“DESTROY ALL HUMANS.”
Oh. You have to admit that you didn’t see that coming. Your visor shorts out again, so you don’t see the final blows that pummel the life out of you, either.
THE END
212
We’re just going to tell you straight up: this will end badly. You hobble out to the street and catch a bus back to the bar where your car is still parked, and it’s past noon before you even manage to get out of Cleveland. You keep tabs on the situation in D.C. via news radio, and it’s getting worse: a second group of villains soon joins in on the fun, and when the Justice Squadron finally does show up, instead of battling their foes, they jump right in on the monumental demolition.
Similar reports start coming in from all over the globe — heroes and villains joined together, destroying landmarks and national monuments, apparently just for kicks. The governments of the world send in their various armies, but they’re ill-prepared to deal with the combined might of the planet’s superpowered beings. As for you, it’s a good seven-hour trip to the capital, and you haven’t even reached Maryland when you see a putrid-looking brown smoke roll in over the hills.
Ew — you roll up your windows, but it gets in through the vents. And this isn’t just your run-of-the-mill southern Pennsylvania smog. It’s poison gas, and it’s everywhere. You’re dead in minutes.
Poison gas? That just isn’t sporting.
THE END
213
Given the choice, you’d prefer to save the planet with as little murdering as possible. Octavia starts linking your mind with the approaching Guardians. Wait for it… wait for it…
Brain blast! You transmit the reprogramming protocol to the entirety of the Cosmic Guard and, suddenly confronted with the unfiltered anguish of their long-suffering hosts, they all shut down at once. But the psychic backlash of all that pain and suffering is too much for your system to handle. You black out along with the others.
When you eventually awaken, it’s to the sound of Octavia’s gentle sobbing in your head. You can’t be sure how long you’ve been out, but you gaze down to the planet beneath you and instantly know that something’s wrong. The blue and white swirls you admired on your first trip to space yesterday are now tinted with a deep, sickly brown.
They did it. They totally destroyed the world.
All around you, your fellow Guardians float listlessly. Their mechanical halves are focused almost entirely on comforting and tranquilizing their newly-empowered organic halves. After a lifetime of following directives, the host minds are eager for someone to tell them what to do — overall, they’re a mess, but the common threads are pain, rage, and an overpowering desire for revenge on whatever power is responsible for their seemingly endless suffering.
You have a pretty good idea how to give it to them.
At this point, your own grief and anger is at least equal to that of your fellow Guardians, and when you start transmitting orders to them, they follow you without hesitation. You discover that two major alien settlements have been established around the huge terraforming stations erected at the Earth’s North and South Poles. These are scientists and technicians, beginning the task of awakening the mothership’s passengers for colonization after their perfect coup. Your Guardian army falls upon them like the hammer of god. They started the job of destroying every living thing on the planet, but within minutes, you finish it.
Wait, Octavia thinks after the last bits of alien encampment have been reduced to rubble. Someone’s still out there. I can sense it. She directs you to New York City — or New Jersey, technically — and a secret base beneath Liberty Island. There you discover an unexpected pair: the Human Torpedo and a very old, very sick woman who you think might be Magnifica. They’re both long-retired heroes and members of Octavia’s old team, the Liberty Patrol.
After an emergency decontamination process, you let Octavia out of the backpack pod, and the Torpedo fills you in on the past day’s events. “The air turned poison first, and people just dropped dead. There was no saving them. I can hold my breath for a long time, but most people…” He trails off. “Maggie wouldn’t give up. She kept going back out to look for survivors, but never found any. They’re all dead, Octavia.”
“Not all of them,” she says, her eyes closed. “There are scattered groups, all over the globe. An underground bunker in Japan. A bio-dome research project in deepest Canada. The alien attackers are gone. If we all work together, we can find a way to rebuild here.”
Octavia can still read your thoughts, though. “Don’t even consider it,” she says. “The planet has never needed its protector more than it does now.”
Your mind, however, is made up. “There’s a backup battlesuit under the Pacific Ocean. I’ll make sure it’s programmed right, and then you can stick anyone in there — you’ll have your Cosmic Guardian.”
The Torpedo nods. “So that’s what that place is — I was just there last night.” His eyes light up with what’s certainly the first glimmer of hope he’s felt today. “In fact, if he’s still safe down there, I know just the hero for the job.”
Your concerns lie elsewhere. After a few days’ preparation, you gather your raving, bloodthirsty troops and head for the stars. The enemy is still out there, spreading like a plague throughout the galaxy. You jump to light speed, your armor’s intelligence taking the reins as your biological mind slips into suspended animation.
You plan to make them suffer.
THE END
216
The needs of the many, apparently, don’t outweigh the needs of you. You sprint for the pod that brought you here, waiting just long enough for Ox to join you before hitting the big red button to launch the craft. Which is actually fairly magnanimous, when you think about it, considering you’re already risking literally billions of lives in an effort to save your own hide. You rocket from the launch bay, and moments later the mothership jumps to light speed, back from whence it came.
As your craft travels toward Earth, you can’t shake the sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. Things might turn out fine, right? Once you get back, you’ll marshal all of the planet’s resources and fight off the alien invasion properly. Heroes and villains, united against a common enemy! The combined military might of every nation! Random alcoholics in crop dusters! There’s still hope. How quickly could the Cosmic Guardians possibly get that enormous starship back on course?
Turns out: pretty quickly. About six minutes into your trip, the pod is rocked by explosions as the alien mothership overtakes it, sending you and your companion to your immediate, excruciatingly painful doom.
All of humanity soon follows.
THE END
217
Magnifica doesn’t need much encouraging — you’ve barely said two words to her when she takes off like a rocket to hunt down and destroy the satellite. A second blast never comes, so from what you can gather she’s successful. However, she doesn’t come back. Is she off battling Cosmic Guardians alone? Rounding up the heroes of yesteryear for a dramatic final stand? You didn’t actually get the chance to tell her about the alien plot, so for all you know she retreated to a secluded mountaintop somewhere to mourn. Clearly she and Nancy were close.
That leaves you in a bit of a tough spot. Are there ways to stop the invasion without the aid of an Orbital Death Laser or the world’s mightiest hero? Sure, but at this stage they pretty much require all the resources of the Nightwatchman. If you so much as power up your wrist computer, the Guardians will pinpoint your location immediately and hit you with enough plasma bolts to kill you ten times before you hit the floor.
So you’re relegated to making phone calls, warning friends and various public officials of the impending invasion. This results in quite a bit of panic (either about the fate of the world or your personal well-being, depending on each recipient’s assessment of your sanity), but very little action.
When the poison gas starts rolling in late in the afternoon, you know that it was all for naught.
THE END
218
It’s a two-hour drive to Connecticut, and during that time things go from bad to worse. Cities across the planet are in supervillain chaos, and then the heroes show up, but only join in the destruction. Governments are marshaling their military forces, but you find precious little news about the blackouts. You worry that whatever’s causing them is spreading so quickly that by the time it overtakes a region, there’s no one left to file a report.
The hospital staff is glued to the cable news channel and seems quite flustered by the day’s events, so the charge nurse doesn’t give you any trouble. “He’s the same as he always is,” she says as she shows you to Tachyon’s room. You’ve left your Nightwatchman gear in the car, of course. “He still wakes up for a couple of minutes every few months, disoriented. Asks what day is it, what year is it. The weird thing is, his vital signs never change, even when he seems lucid.” She shrugs. “Oh, and occasionally he’ll ask how the Canucks are doing, but I don’t actually know what that means.”
He looks impossibly old and frail. You remember seeing photos taken when he was active in the ’60s and ’70s, and he wasn’t a particularly young man even then. As soon as the nurse leaves the room, however, his eyes pop open.
“I thought she’d never leave.”
Tachyon! You can’t believe your good fortune. Could it actually be possible to change the past?
“Aliens are attacking,” you say. How can you explain this quickly? “I think they’re poisoning the planet — you have to go back in time and stop them!”
“So today is the day,” he says slowly. “I’ve spent a lifetime gathering information, and finally it has come to pass.”
“You knew? Why didn’t you do anything?”
“There’s still time. There’s always time. What do we know about the aliens’ plan?”
You think for a moment. “We know that they’ve been here for years. That they’re responsible for the current crop of heroes and villains.”
“Not just the current ones,” Tachyon says. “Poor Dogstar. They had already destroyed his homeworld, so he came here to warn us of the alien probe that might one day come, heralding our doom. He was too late. The probe was a testing unit, sent to determine how Earth’s biology would react to their mutagens. Maggie and Charles and the rest of us — we were the result of those tests. By the time Dogstar arrived, that probe was already making the return trip to report its findings.”
“So first they turn us into superheroes, and then forty years later they come back and poison us all? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“The first trip was just for reconnaissance. After that, they sent the Cosmic Guardian. Or the Guardian armor, rather — it bonded with the human Sten Jannsen and set up research facilities to gather data the aliens would need to terraform our planet. As we speak, they’re transforming it into an ecosystem that can support them — the destruction of all pre-existing life is simply a side effect.”
“But why keep manufacturing superheroes?” The pieces still don’t quite seem to fit. “What’s the point of creating the Justice Squadron and all the rest?”
“I was never sure of that myself. But I think now we have our answer.” He gestures to the television news blaring from down the hall. “Look what’s happening out there. The terraforming has already begun, yet all of the planet’s defenses are being marshaled against a mishmash of spandex-clad fools trying to destroy the Eiffel Tower and the Lincoln Memorial.”
It’s nice that non-superpowered scumbags can have arch-enemies as well, you think. And it makes sense that Nancy would be his — over the years, her investigations have surely cost Crexidyne billions. If Nancy is pleased to have gotten so far under his skin, though, it doesn’t show on her face. In fact, the icy steel of her gaze is mildly terrifying, even to you. “Why did Thorpe order Brain Stem’s murder?” she asks. It sounds more like a command than a question.
Moretti sneers. “Reginald Thorpe is a genius — his brilliance has long since transcended day-to-day operations. It’s my duty to interpret his visions and attempt to make them a reality. So that particular order came from me.”
“Tell me why.”
“Always focusing on the details,” he scoffs, “and missing the big picture staring you right in the face. The question isn’t why we killed him. It’s why we created him. Why we created any of them.”
Moretti tells you that every single human being to gain superpowers since the the mid-’80s — heroes and villains alike — has been the result of experiments conducted by Crexidyne. They would abduct strangers off the streets and strike a bargain: powers far beyond those of mortal men in exchange for loyalty to Thorpe, and a promise to help take over the world when the time came. The idea was that anyone willing to make such a bargain would suit Crexidyne’s purposes, and anyone unwilling had their memory of the incident erased and was given a dose of pancreatic cancer as a lovely parting gift.
“How do you give a person pancreatic cancer?” you ask. It may not be the most relevant detail, but the prospect of it horrifies you, and you just sort of blurt it out.
Moretti pauses, staring at you like you’re beneath his contempt. “We have a tiny little man who shrinks down and personally delivers it to your pancreas.” With all his talk of superpowers, you can’t be sure if he’s serious or if he’s just being a dick.
Nancy’s thoughts, however, are elsewhere. “You couldn’t possibly have kept all this a secret,” she says. “Someone would have talked.”
“Oh, we wiped the memories of the successful recruits as well — those who survived. We left them to their own devices. Some turned to crime, and the more narcissistic among them imagined themselves heroes, basking in the adoration of the masses. We were confident that eventually restoring memories of the bargain — and the knowledge that we could relieve them of their precious superpowers any time we chose — would keep them in line when the moment came.”
“So why kill Brain Stem?” Nancy demands. “Why now?”
“We always had the technology to mindwipe them,” Moretti answers, “but his psychic abilities made the process much simpler. However, the little bastard had… ambitions. So we kept erasing his memories and rebriefing him whenever we had need of his talents. Eventually the repeated wipes took a toll on his mind, and he became useless to us. But he kept using those damn powers to dig for his lost memories. Finally we had to activate one of our more reliable agents to put him down for good.”
Something about his story is bugging you. “He’s lying. Why would he even tell us all this if it were true?”
“Because it’s too late,” Nancy says. “He knows he’s already dead. I can see it in his eyes.”
Supervillains often spill every detail of their nefarious plots to heroes they have in their clutches, but you’re pretty sure the habit comes from an unconscious desire to fail, or just garden-variety stupidity. If Moretti truly has accomplished everything he’s claiming, he can’t possibly suffer from either of those. Is he stalling for time? Nancy, so close to answers she’s been seeking for decades, insists on continuing the interrogation.
▶ If you trust her judgment and hear Moretti out, click here for page 157.
▶ If you think you’re only playing into his hands and walk away, click here for page 242.
210
Really? You’ve come all this way, uncovered the alien plot, witnessed Nancy North’s untimely death, built a spaceship out of a supersonic jet, and when finally called upon to do something truly heroic, you opt instead to save your own skin? Seriously, we were so sure you’d make the other call we almost didn’t bother to put a choice in there.
And don’t give us that “I was just checking this page to see what would happen” business either — you were checking the cowardly route to see if you could get away with it. Guess what? You can’t. The mothership survives and throws a wave of 6,000 Cosmic Guardians at you, who disintegrate your jet on the spot. And don’t try flipping back to the previous page and choosing the other path, either. You go right back and start over at the beginning.
You go back, and you think about what you’ve done.
THE END
211
Do they think you stole Jannsen’s armor? “He totally gave it to me!” you shout through your loudspeaker. Then it occurs to you that they probably don’t even speak English. But your armor can translate! You tell it to explain what happened to the rest of the Guard.
You swell upward and you support, it says. You can’t actually determine if it’s speaking to the other Guardians or to you. Is assimilated this persona this duration completely, function immediately of verb the internal duration.
Translation: not your armor’s strongest suit. The blasts keep coming. Your visual display crackles back to life, so you use the opportunity to start your descent — you’re afraid their continued attacks will short out your suit completely, and if that happens, you’d rather not be 10,000 feet in the air. However, they appear to interpret your actions as a hostile maneuver. A Guardian charges you, smacking you with several tentacles, and you lose control, plunging toward solid ground. You’re cooperating, dammit! If they would give you some instructions, you’d be happy to comply. You start yelling commands to your battlesuit. “Open up a communications channel or something so I can talk to them!”
You right yourself just before impact, but then another Guardian slams you into the earth — your suit absorbs much of the impact, but it still knocks the wind out of you. You hear a click, finally receiving a transmission from your attackers.
“DESTROY ALL HUMANS.”
Oh. You have to admit that you didn’t see that coming. Your visor shorts out again, so you don’t see the final blows that pummel the life out of you, either.
THE END
212
We’re just going to tell you straight up: this will end badly. You hobble out to the street and catch a bus back to the bar where your car is still parked, and it’s past noon before you even manage to get out of Cleveland. You keep tabs on the situation in D.C. via news radio, and it’s getting worse: a second group of villains soon joins in on the fun, and when the Justice Squadron finally does show up, instead of battling their foes, they jump right in on the monumental demolition.
Similar reports start coming in from all over the globe — heroes and villains joined together, destroying landmarks and national monuments, apparently just for kicks. The governments of the world send in their various armies, but they’re ill-prepared to deal with the combined might of the planet’s superpowered beings. As for you, it’s a good seven-hour trip to the capital, and you haven’t even reached Maryland when you see a putrid-looking brown smoke roll in over the hills.
Ew — you roll up your windows, but it gets in through the vents. And this isn’t just your run-of-the-mill southern Pennsylvania smog. It’s poison gas, and it’s everywhere. You’re dead in minutes.
Poison gas? That just isn’t sporting.
THE END
213
Given the choice, you’d prefer to save the planet with as little murdering as possible. Octavia starts linking your mind with the approaching Guardians. Wait for it… wait for it…
Brain blast! You transmit the reprogramming protocol to the entirety of the Cosmic Guard and, suddenly confronted with the unfiltered anguish of their long-suffering hosts, they all shut down at once. But the psychic backlash of all that pain and suffering is too much for your system to handle. You black out along with the others.
When you eventually awaken, it’s to the sound of Octavia’s gentle sobbing in your head. You can’t be sure how long you’ve been out, but you gaze down to the planet beneath you and instantly know that something’s wrong. The blue and white swirls you admired on your first trip to space yesterday are now tinted with a deep, sickly brown.
They did it. They totally destroyed the world.
All around you, your fellow Guardians float listlessly. Their mechanical halves are focused almost entirely on comforting and tranquilizing their newly-empowered organic halves. After a lifetime of following directives, the host minds are eager for someone to tell them what to do — overall, they’re a mess, but the common threads are pain, rage, and an overpowering desire for revenge on whatever power is responsible for their seemingly endless suffering.
You have a pretty good idea how to give it to them.
At this point, your own grief and anger is at least equal to that of your fellow Guardians, and when you start transmitting orders to them, they follow you without hesitation. You discover that two major alien settlements have been established around the huge terraforming stations erected at the Earth’s North and South Poles. These are scientists and technicians, beginning the task of awakening the mothership’s passengers for colonization after their perfect coup. Your Guardian army falls upon them like the hammer of god. They started the job of destroying every living thing on the planet, but within minutes, you finish it.
Wait, Octavia thinks after the last bits of alien encampment have been reduced to rubble. Someone’s still out there. I can sense it. She directs you to New York City — or New Jersey, technically — and a secret base beneath Liberty Island. There you discover an unexpected pair: the Human Torpedo and a very old, very sick woman who you think might be Magnifica. They’re both long-retired heroes and members of Octavia’s old team, the Liberty Patrol.
After an emergency decontamination process, you let Octavia out of the backpack pod, and the Torpedo fills you in on the past day’s events. “The air turned poison first, and people just dropped dead. There was no saving them. I can hold my breath for a long time, but most people…” He trails off. “Maggie wouldn’t give up. She kept going back out to look for survivors, but never found any. They’re all dead, Octavia.”
“Not all of them,” she says, her eyes closed. “There are scattered groups, all over the globe. An underground bunker in Japan. A bio-dome research project in deepest Canada. The alien attackers are gone. If we all work together, we can find a way to rebuild here.”
Octavia can still read your thoughts, though. “Don’t even consider it,” she says. “The planet has never needed its protector more than it does now.”
Your mind, however, is made up. “There’s a backup battlesuit under the Pacific Ocean. I’ll make sure it’s programmed right, and then you can stick anyone in there — you’ll have your Cosmic Guardian.”
The Torpedo nods. “So that’s what that place is — I was just there last night.” His eyes light up with what’s certainly the first glimmer of hope he’s felt today. “In fact, if he’s still safe down there, I know just the hero for the job.”
Your concerns lie elsewhere. After a few days’ preparation, you gather your raving, bloodthirsty troops and head for the stars. The enemy is still out there, spreading like a plague throughout the galaxy. You jump to light speed, your armor’s intelligence taking the reins as your biological mind slips into suspended animation.
You plan to make them suffer.
THE END
216
The needs of the many, apparently, don’t outweigh the needs of you. You sprint for the pod that brought you here, waiting just long enough for Ox to join you before hitting the big red button to launch the craft. Which is actually fairly magnanimous, when you think about it, considering you’re already risking literally billions of lives in an effort to save your own hide. You rocket from the launch bay, and moments later the mothership jumps to light speed, back from whence it came.
As your craft travels toward Earth, you can’t shake the sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. Things might turn out fine, right? Once you get back, you’ll marshal all of the planet’s resources and fight off the alien invasion properly. Heroes and villains, united against a common enemy! The combined military might of every nation! Random alcoholics in crop dusters! There’s still hope. How quickly could the Cosmic Guardians possibly get that enormous starship back on course?
Turns out: pretty quickly. About six minutes into your trip, the pod is rocked by explosions as the alien mothership overtakes it, sending you and your companion to your immediate, excruciatingly painful doom.
All of humanity soon follows.
THE END
217
Magnifica doesn’t need much encouraging — you’ve barely said two words to her when she takes off like a rocket to hunt down and destroy the satellite. A second blast never comes, so from what you can gather she’s successful. However, she doesn’t come back. Is she off battling Cosmic Guardians alone? Rounding up the heroes of yesteryear for a dramatic final stand? You didn’t actually get the chance to tell her about the alien plot, so for all you know she retreated to a secluded mountaintop somewhere to mourn. Clearly she and Nancy were close.
That leaves you in a bit of a tough spot. Are there ways to stop the invasion without the aid of an Orbital Death Laser or the world’s mightiest hero? Sure, but at this stage they pretty much require all the resources of the Nightwatchman. If you so much as power up your wrist computer, the Guardians will pinpoint your location immediately and hit you with enough plasma bolts to kill you ten times before you hit the floor.
So you’re relegated to making phone calls, warning friends and various public officials of the impending invasion. This results in quite a bit of panic (either about the fate of the world or your personal well-being, depending on each recipient’s assessment of your sanity), but very little action.
When the poison gas starts rolling in late in the afternoon, you know that it was all for naught.
THE END
218
It’s a two-hour drive to Connecticut, and during that time things go from bad to worse. Cities across the planet are in supervillain chaos, and then the heroes show up, but only join in the destruction. Governments are marshaling their military forces, but you find precious little news about the blackouts. You worry that whatever’s causing them is spreading so quickly that by the time it overtakes a region, there’s no one left to file a report.
The hospital staff is glued to the cable news channel and seems quite flustered by the day’s events, so the charge nurse doesn’t give you any trouble. “He’s the same as he always is,” she says as she shows you to Tachyon’s room. You’ve left your Nightwatchman gear in the car, of course. “He still wakes up for a couple of minutes every few months, disoriented. Asks what day is it, what year is it. The weird thing is, his vital signs never change, even when he seems lucid.” She shrugs. “Oh, and occasionally he’ll ask how the Canucks are doing, but I don’t actually know what that means.”
He looks impossibly old and frail. You remember seeing photos taken when he was active in the ’60s and ’70s, and he wasn’t a particularly young man even then. As soon as the nurse leaves the room, however, his eyes pop open.
“I thought she’d never leave.”
Tachyon! You can’t believe your good fortune. Could it actually be possible to change the past?
“Aliens are attacking,” you say. How can you explain this quickly? “I think they’re poisoning the planet — you have to go back in time and stop them!”
“So today is the day,” he says slowly. “I’ve spent a lifetime gathering information, and finally it has come to pass.”
“You knew? Why didn’t you do anything?”
“There’s still time. There’s always time. What do we know about the aliens’ plan?”
You think for a moment. “We know that they’ve been here for years. That they’re responsible for the current crop of heroes and villains.”
“Not just the current ones,” Tachyon says. “Poor Dogstar. They had already destroyed his homeworld, so he came here to warn us of the alien probe that might one day come, heralding our doom. He was too late. The probe was a testing unit, sent to determine how Earth’s biology would react to their mutagens. Maggie and Charles and the rest of us — we were the result of those tests. By the time Dogstar arrived, that probe was already making the return trip to report its findings.”
“So first they turn us into superheroes, and then forty years later they come back and poison us all? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“The first trip was just for reconnaissance. After that, they sent the Cosmic Guardian. Or the Guardian armor, rather — it bonded with the human Sten Jannsen and set up research facilities to gather data the aliens would need to terraform our planet. As we speak, they’re transforming it into an ecosystem that can support them — the destruction of all pre-existing life is simply a side effect.”
“But why keep manufacturing superheroes?” The pieces still don’t quite seem to fit. “What’s the point of creating the Justice Squadron and all the rest?”
“I was never sure of that myself. But I think now we have our answer.” He gestures to the television news blaring from down the hall. “Look what’s happening out there. The terraforming has already begun, yet all of the planet’s defenses are being marshaled against a mishmash of spandex-clad fools trying to destroy the Eiffel Tower and the Lincoln Memorial.”
