Thrusts of Justice (Chooseomatic Books), page 23
You also immediately understand that you can pinpoint the location of each of the thousands of other Guardian units. Which means that, in return, they can pinpoint you.
You leap into the sky through the bedroom window, taking out a big chunk of Octavia’s exterior wall in the process. Fifteen or twenty Guardians are approaching from the east, but you’re ready for them, and adjust your energy field to absorb their blasts. You now understand that the Guardian armor is equipped with safeguards to defend against its own weaponry. The key to fighting these things will be coming up with avenues of attack they don’t expect.
As the Guardians surround you, one suddenly drops out of the sky like a rock, and you hear Octavia’s voice in your head. I put the host to sleep, and the whole thing went down. Huge portions of their brains are dedicated to protecting the host.
That gives you an idea. A gargantuan, slug-shaped Guardian swoops down, attempting to grapple. You know that if enough of them get a hold of you, they could pull your armor clean off. But instead of dodging, you let it grab you and form a mental connection. You know from your armor’s past experiences just how powerful the host-protection protocol is. So your plan — it’s really more of a harebrained scheme at this point, but you’re flying by the seat of your pants here — is to couch a set of instructions within that protocol.
The host is at risk, you think, transmitting all of the data you compiled years ago while developing the unique graft method with Janssen. If you can convince this Guardian unit that the madness it has instilled in its occupant constitutes a mortal threat, it might accept the solution you’re offering, which is to reconfigure its bond into an equal mind-partnership the same way you did.
It works! However, while you and your armor have a bond between two strong, independent minds, the other Guardian finds only a deep well of insanity in its host, with very little consciousness left. It freezes up and goes offline entirely.
Meanwhile, others are coming in for the kill. Armored hands, pincers, and tentacles lock onto you. Octavia! Help!
You feel her consciousness spread out, linking your mind in a web with the others. You send the rebonding directive in a blast, and the Guardians all disengage, falling from the sky as one and hitting the ground in a cacophony of thuds.
There’s no time for celebration — the alien mothership is already in orbit. They’ll already be preparing to launch their terraforming towers. You have to stop them!
Still inside your head, Octavia insists on coming with you. Into space? You recall an armor configuration that would allow you to carry a passenger in a giant pod like a backpack, but it isn’t ideal for battle and would certainly slow you down. Besides, in the event of your — let’s face it — incredibly likely failure and death, wouldn’t it be better to leave her on Earth to gather the troops?
▶ If you suspect you’ll need all the help you can get and take Octavia along for the ride, click here for page 128.
▶ If you think it’s more tactically sound to go alone, click here for page 180.
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What the hell, it’s not your brain. You tell the Ox that shoving something called a mnemonic grub inside his head sounds like a swell idea. He cracks open the orb and sticks the wriggling worm in his ear. You expect the Squadron to jump you, but instead Moretti waves them back. The Ox falls to his knees, clasps his hands over his ears, and screams. His face contorts into a mask of pain.
It doesn’t let up. After a few moments, he starts to slump. Whatever it’s doing to him, you’re worried that he may not survive it. Not knowing what else to do, you put your hand on your friend’s head and send a tendril of gunk into his ear canal after the worm. You close your eyes and concentrate on the purple goo, trying to sense the path the grub made into his brain. It works — you manage to lasso the little bugger and yank it out of his head.
The Ox gasps and lets out a roar. “Moretti!” he shouts, veins bulging in his neck and forehead. “You did this to me!” He lunges just as a Cosmic Guardian leaps forward to intercept him, but he bats it aside with one hand, knocking it halfway down the street.
Gravity Bomb lifts a hand and you instantly fall to the pavement, immobile. The Ox is quite a bit stronger than you, though, and now he’s truly pissed — he slows a little but doesn’t stop moving. Coldfront hurls a volley of icicles at him, which only bounce right off his hide. The insectoid Guardian moves to intercept, only to get pummeled into the pavement by a two-handed blow.
The eyeball Guardian focuses on you, seemingly unaffected by the intensified gravity that’s keeping you stuck to the asphalt, and wraps several of its tentacles around your midsection. Crap! You’ve seen enough hentai to know where this is going. There’s not much you can do to defend yourself beneath the weight of the gravity field, but you manage to send a few thin strings of goo creeping across your attacker’s armor. You pray that you can find a vulnerability somewhere and force enough gunk into the suit to mess it up on the inside.
As the goo seeps in, you hear something like a voice inside your head. You were able to feel the stuff moving through the Ox’s brain and Magnifico’s circulatory system — now it seems to be opening some kind of communication channel with the alien’s mind. Except what you’re getting isn’t exactly speech, and you wouldn’t exactly call it a mind. It’s like a series of psychic impressions coming from two distinct sources — the cool, mechanical intelligence of the Guardian armor, and some kind of insane, animal rage coming from what can only be the alien eyeball monster. It’s difficult to comprehend, but you get flashes of something about global conquest. Or worldwide extinction? Something to that effect.
Meanwhile, the Ox has the big bug pinned down and is furiously raining blows upon it. Its armor has already shattered to pieces, and its soft interior is steadily being mashed into pulp. The Ox turns to face your attacker, and the thing’s giant eyeball does what through its battlesuit appears to be an exaggerated double-take. Both its mechanical and insane biological thoughts converge into something approximating “uh-oh,” and it pulls away from your gooey tendrils and flees.
You feel gravity returning to normal, and look up to see the rest of the Justice Squadron beating a hasty retreat. The helicopter pilot has already taken flight — the only person unaccounted for is Moretti. That’s when you spot his tablet computer on the ground a few yards from the fracas and two telltale legs sticking out from under the busted-up Bug Guardian like the Wicked Witch of the East.
Ouch. That can’t be a pleasant way to go.
The Ox’s eyes are still wild with rage, and it seems that whatever memories he recovered from the worm have brought little comfort. “I remember a dark room,” he says. “I dunno, it’s all in bits and pieces. Moretti was there, and that Brain Stem guy from the Squadron. There were all these experiments…”
He shudders. “A lotta pain. I think they made me promise something? Like, I gave up something important?” His eyes narrow and he cracks his knuckles loudly. “Whatever. I’m gonna go kick some more ass until somebody tells me what the hell they did to me.”
The urge toward global domination that you sensed in the Eyeball Guardian has definitely piqued your curiosity. But even though the pair of you managed to defeat Magnifico and the Bug Guardian, you’re pretty sure you’d get clobbered if the Squadron pools its resources. Revenge sounds like a losing proposition. You suspect you’ll both be better off if you can persuade the Ox to look for answers through self-reflection rather than storming off on some kind of suicidal rampage.
Then again, you’re pretty much a supervillain now. Who are you trying to kid? People like you live for suicidal rampages.
▶ If you’re on board with vengeance, click here for page 136.
▶ If you try to sell the Ox on inner peace instead, click here for page 75.
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Screw this noise. You focus all of the suit’s power into your rocket thrusters and blast off. The Ox manages to hold on for about 200 vertical feet and then falls to the earth, taking a big chunk of your suit with him. It’s a chunk that was in some way responsible for flight stability, too, judging by the way you go careening off on a random trajectory and crash into a hillside about a mile from the freeway.
Ouch. You’re not certain if your body is more busted up than your cosmic space armor, but you’re pretty sure you’ll need to be airlifted out of here, since the suit is no longer responding to any mental commands. But Moretti’s crew is monitoring you, right? Surely they’ll send someone along. As you lay motionless for 20 or 30 minutes, though, you start to have your doubts. They don’t think you abandoned your mission, do they? I mean, technically you did, but it was a matter of life and death!
Then you see a strange orange glow in the sky directly above you. At first you think it’s a rescue vehicle, but it’s just a little pinpoint of light that’s quickly becoming brighter and more intense. You might be getting paranoid, but now you start to wonder if Migraine was implanting one of those targeting beacons on you while he was riding inside your helmet. Before you have a chance to even panic properly, the light becomes an enormous orange beam and you’re instantly burned to a crisp.
Let this be a lesson about trusting any organization that utilizes orbital death lasers. They implanted that beacon while you were still in the helicopter.
THE END
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If Magnifica is going to force you to pick between them, you’ll take geriatric muscle over ethically-questionable brains. The decision has two significant consequences: first, it makes Tinker cry (he tries to suck it up and exit the hangar with all the dignity he can muster, but it’s not a pretty sight).
Second, when Conrad finishes making modifications to the jet, the results are less than breathtaking. “You’re sure this thing will hold up?” you ask.
“Absolutely not,” he replies. “But if it manages to break atmosphere we should be fine. And Maggie will rescue us if we just plain fall out of the sky before that point — right, Maggie?”
Magnifica just grunts. “Come on, you pansies. We’ve got a planet to save.”
Conrad, it turns out, is able to pilot the craft using only the power of his mind, and he’s as brave as they come. His grasp of aerospace engineering, however, is really only that of an enthusiastic amateur. The modified jet starts shaking violently as it gains altitude.
And then it explodes.
THE END
279
Nightwatchman’s jet may be 1,300 miles away, but you still have access to another of his assets: absolutely staggering wealth. You find his credit card number on file, and quickly pay the obscene sum of money required to charter a Learjet from New York City to Broward County, departing immediately.
You switch planes at the rest home and head due north. By now, though, the situation has worsened. Huge chunks of the world’s communications grid have gone offline, and when you reach the vicinity of northern Canada, you find out why. The sky around you turns a putrid brown, and the very landscape below is shifting. Snowy expanses are torn asunder while patches of greenery wither and die, only to be replaced by something creeping and mold-like. You realize that the alien’s aren’t just invading. They’re terraforming.
That’s why Crexidyne commanded its superpowered forces to attack various population centers of the world — to divert attention from all of this. And when a fleet of Cosmic Guardians flanks your jet, you know that you’re too late to stop it. Their alien technology apparently trumps yours, because suddenly you lose control of the craft, spiraling to your doom.
The rest of the planet will be joining you shortly.
THE END
280
You tell Dale you’ll call him later — if you’re really going to keep everything on the downlow, you’ll need to find some genuine privacy. So you blast off into the stratosphere, flying halfway around the globe in about ten minutes to the general region where you imagine Nepal to be. If you can find peace and quiet anywhere, you figure it’ll be Mount freaking Everest.
The suit keeps you at a toasty 78 degrees even at this altitude, so you begin teaching yourself to control it, slowly learning to communicate with the artificial intelligence through a kind of telepathic link. Other than a quick jaunt back to Cleveland to raid your apartment for snacks, you get lost in your project and spend the next 18 hours bonding with the suit. By the next morning (or morning Cleveland time, anyway), you’ve made some real progress, and even have your laptop’s copy of Windows XP running in your visor’s display under a subroutine. A popup keeps reminding you that it’s an unregistered version that will expire in 30 days, but at least you’ve got internet.
And the internet has some news. A group of supervillains is making a full-scale attack on Washington, D.C.! It couldn’t come at a worse time — you’re on the verge of a real breakthrough in your studies. Plus, you’re totally keeping it secret here. The east coast is lousy with superheroes — can’t the Justice Squadron or the Phenomenal Three take care of this?
▶ That’s no way for a hero to think! If you storm off to join the battle, click here for page 188.
▶ If you stay put for now and let someone else handle the attack, click here for page 127.
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Is it the bravest thing you’ve ever done, or just the stupidest?
It’s both.
You step forward and wrap your arms around the Ox’s hulking, armored form in the most loving embrace you can muster. He returns the gesture by squeezing you so tightly that your spine crumples, your organs liquefy, and the marrow damned near goes squirting out of your bones.
Octavia may be compassionate to a fault, but among her strengths is a willingness to take responsibility for her own shortcomings. She admits to Magnifica that in retrospect attempting to hug a supervillain mid-rampage was a spectacularly awful idea.
THE END
282
You’ve already limited yourself to the world’s most decrepit heroes, so the last thing you want to do is split your meager forces. You head for the North Pole — Magnifica, the Human Torpedo, and Princess Pixie under their own power, and the rest of you following behind in the jet. Torpedo apparently makes a detour to pick up his old sidekick, because by the time you catch up to the others at your destination, Ocean Boy has joined the team as well.
The battle is epic. You find the tip of what must be an enormous alien tower poking out from beneath the polar ice sheet, and Tina the Tank leaps out to pound the thing with her bare fists. You open fire on the swarming fleet of Cosmic Guardians — aliens of all shapes and sizes in armored battlesuits — while your teammates wage war beneath the ocean’s surface. Ocean Boy proves to be particularly majestic, breaking through the ice and hurtling through the air after the occasional foe who attempts to escape his underwater fury. If he’s this badass above the water’s surface, you can’t even imagine what he’s like underneath it.
You reduce the terraforming tower to rubble with your all-out attack. It’s not a particularly speedy process, however, and therein lies the problem — by the time you’ve emerged victorious, the Cosmic Guard has sent reinforcements from their southern encampment. And they bring along a weird, glowing orb that robs your teammates of their superpowers, shutting down your telepathic link to the Nightwatchman’s jet as well.
You’re not sure how the others fare, but you crash into a glacier and explode.
THE END
283
You pull the trigger. It takes about six seconds for the satellite weapon to receive your signal, lock on to its new target, and fire.
“Crap in a hat,” the Ox mutters, then drops Moretti and smashes through the wall behind him, vacating the premises just as a ten-foot-diameter column of orange light tears through the ceiling. It momentarily blinds you and utterly disintegrates everything it touches, right down to the building’s foundation. Needless to say, that includes Agent Moretti.
“Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!” You fall to your knees and cry out to the heavens (or, technically, to a non-collapsed segment of the room’s fluorescent lighting). You just killed your boss, and somehow didn’t even manage to take out the rampaging supervillain with him.
As your eyesight returns, you see a dozen large shapes descending slowly through the newly-blasted hole in the roof. They’re encased in armor that looks just like your own, only in a variety of freaky alien forms. Oh, no. You’ve caused the death of an innocent being — surely that’s against whatever code of conduct you theoretically signed off on when you took this job. Has the Cosmic Guard come to discipline you? To make you turn in your badge and gun?
▶ If you humbly throw yourself upon the mercy of cosmic space court (assuming that’s what this is), click here for page 243.
▶ If you run like hell, click here for page 202.
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The alien entity comes at you with full force, but you quickly withdraw your slime away from the machine, breaking the psychic connection. It has no power over you here. Well, almost no power. Suddenly an odd thought pops into your head.
MAN, ALL THIS ALIEN INVASION STUFF IS SUPER-DEPRESSING. YOU SHOULD TOTALLY JUST TAKE YOUR OWN LIFE RIGHT NOW.
Wow. You have to at least give Cosmo points for trying. If the Cosmic Guardians are used as shock troops, you think, the invasion may have already begun. Is that why they attacked Lightning Queen? To take out the competition?
