Once my black leotard is on I roll under the pull bar and line up the chair with the marks on the floor. The bar lowers to where I can grab, then it pulls me up.
“Epic—initiate,” I order. The AI complies; the armor flies off the wall as one piece and wraps around me like a second skin. The whole process takes less than ten seconds and my HUD boots up.
“Show me the action. I want live footage.” The prison is forty miles away. At top speed, I can be there in twelve minutes. I don’t even bother to shut the skylight as I blast away. I accelerate as fast as I can. The wind bangs me around as Epic fights to compensate.
A window pops up, letting me see the fight from the reporter's point of view. The Diamondbacks are seriously outclassed. It isn’t Vixen alone trying to free White Rhino, but her, dozens of men with guns, and four supers from the wrong side of the tracks.
“Identify threat levels,” I command Epic.
His main housing is back in the workshop. There isn’t any feasible way I could put the necessary components to run him inside the suit. We use tight beam UHF radio for most of our work. He can also track me through the Internet and keep logged in. Hacking most wireless signals takes him less time than it takes to say, ‘wireless signals.’ This way the computer housing he lives in can be supercooled back at the house. Plus, with him not in the suit, the power requirements are far less than they would be otherwise. If I could figure out a way to increase power tenfold I could use something like computronium to house him in the suit itself, but that will have to be for the MKII.
The four villains pop up on my screen. My timer says I only have a few minutes to figure these guys out. Frostfire is categorized as the most powerful. The database says he’s an F4 with the ability to generate fire and ice blasts along with limited control over the elements. He uses the ice as armor and his fire to keep himself warm while doing it. I may need to take him out first.
Grappler is your basic strong guy. He’s not as strong or as invulnerable as Rhino, but he’s agile and can fight.
Tess Harper, a telekinetic who can form shields. There isn’t a lot of information on her. She doesn’t even have a codename.
Finally, there is Deadman, a gun-toting lunatic who is determined to rid the world of super people. A real psychopath. It is unclear if he has superpowers or if he is just highly skilled.
Time’s up. I can see the battle ahead. A large military-style transport with a flatbed has Rhino strapped in place and likely sedated. The Diamondbacks are pinned down. They don’t really have any heavyweights. It’s not like people want to be in Arizona when they can pick somewhere else. Major Force is their physically strongest guy, the other two have more utility powers.
Frostfire has the soldiers pinned down with gouts of flame. Grappler is going hand to hand with Domino and Mr. Perfect. Domino can teleport and fight, Mr. Perfect is a so-called ‘mage.’ Vixen is trying to cut through the straps holding down Rhino and Harper is—I slam hard into something and deflect straight down. I put my arms up and yell as I crash into the ground. Dirt and sand cover my display and play havoc with my sensors. I must have hit one of Harper's shields. My heart thumps in my ears making it hard to focus.
I push myself up only to be slammed back down. I didn’t realize she could use her powers like a battering ram. The kinetic shields are holding but she’s still putting enough pressure on me to override my own strength. I watch the power cells drain noticeably.
“Epic, maximum horizontal thrust!”
I can only imagine the blast of dirt and sand behind me as four thrusters go to full burn at once. Will this even work? I slip past her telekinetic barrier and am free in a second. I spin around, flying backward while scanning for her.
“I think your categorization of threats might need work.” The good news is my kinetic force beam is now at 100% power. Someone is going to have a bad day and I think it will be Harper.
The suit’s sensors ping her. She’s standing behind Frostfire, an ice shield slowly melting in front of her. Frostfire has two streams of flames like mini tornadoes spewing seventy feet in front of him. The soldiers are all face down in the sand trying to stay under it. I don’t know how long they can last, but it won’t be long. Lives come first. The DB’s are going to have to handle Grappler on their own.
“Charge IP cannons, maximum yield area effect.” Shooting them over an area diminishes their capacity, but it will get attention. I need to be less than thirty feet to use them. I put my head down and bank around. Epic does the calculations for me and I decide another header at two-hundred miles an hour isn’t a good idea. My shields are still recovering from the first one.
I brake hard and come down to highway speed. I’m flying right at them and they don’t see me—
Epic fires for me. The Ionic Pulse charge spreads out and smacks into them. They both scream. Would it be enough to knock them out? Harper falls immediately. Frostfire turns his attention to me. I smile. This is going to be good. I land twenty feet away and pipe my voice over the PA.
“Surrender now and you won’t have to go the hospital.”
I don’t know where I come up with these lines. God do they sound cheesy.
“Funny,” he says.
Fire leaps from his hands and splashes against my suit. The shielding is ineffective as fire is heat energy. However, my titanium tungsten carbide armor won’t even be warm to the touch until he starts turning sand to glass.
“Lock on with Kinetic Lance,” I think of a cool name for it as I say it. I like it. Epic brackets him and I grin again.
“Fire.” I watch as the invisible beam of force strikes him in the chest, sending him flying. The flames die immediately. The HUD says the air temp is eight-hundred degrees and I don’t feel a thing.
“Charge cannons, fifty percent power. Fire.” I flatten Harper with another stun blast to make sure she’s out and follow up my lance on Frostfire with a third stun blast. They’re both out. Which leaves Vixen, Grappler, and Deadman.
Bullets ping off my armor as I stride past Frostfire. Epic puts a diagram on my screen showing me the seven point six two millimeter rounds as they fall to the ground at my feet. They’re powerful, capable of penetrating soft armor. But my suit isn’t soft. Maybe if he had a fifty-caliber sniper rifle I might be worried.
Deadman takes a knee next to the truck Rhino is on and he’s firing what Epic identifies as an AK-47. Brass spits out the side and I’m pretty sure every round hits. I flinch for the first few before I dial up my kinetic shields and watch as the Lance charges. The bullets stop in mid-air. They fall to the sand a foot from me. He may be a nutjob but he’s persistent. He lets his rifle drop and pulls his pistol. He fires as he moves to the left. He’s heading for cover. Epic brackets him with the lance.
“Fire.”
The invisible force shoots out and sends him spinning into the car he was heading for. I spread out my hands and blast him with the cannons to make sure he’s down. His spasming body tells me he is. I spin around for whatever is next. Vixen is floating in midair, purple bands of energy wrapped around her like chains. Grappler is being dragged unconscious to the back of the truck by Major Force, the team's leader. He’s six-six if he’s an inch, short blond hair and crystal blue eyes. Epic lists his powers as strength, agility, and a preternatural danger sense. It doesn’t say super good looks because even my scientific heart melts when he looks at me.
I just wish he wasn’t scowling.
“Who the hell are you?” he points his finger at me.
Uh-oh.
Unconsciously I look around. He can’t be talking to me? Then he walks right at me and I realize he is. Did I screw up some secret operation? I saved lives here! Those soldiers would have fried like eggs on the pavement if it weren’t for me.
“Listen,” I pipe over the PA, “I put Rhino in the hole and I wanted to make sure he stayed there. It looked like you could use some help, so I helped. You have a problem with that?”
I cringe inside, I shouldn’t ha
ve said the last part. Apparently, putting on this armor ups my sass factor.
From the way his eyes narrow it’s obvious he does have a problem with me. He looms over me. My armor adds a few inches but not much. I’m liking him less and less as the seconds tick by. Is he going to punch me? I’m pretty sure I could take his whole team down but that would screw up my plans. This isn’t going at all like I wanted.
He looks like he’s about to yell at me when Domino places a hand on his arm and pulls him back.
She fills her costume like it was poured on. Her mask, half white, half black, like her name, covers the area around her sparkling eyes.
“Luke, she helped us out big time. Try not to blow a gasket. Go talk to the First Sergeant and make sure all the men are okay,” she says. Interestingly, I notice she leaves her hand on his arm the entire time. His demeanor shifts, and he nods.
“Okay fine, you talk to her.”
I take a step back. If they plan on attacking I need to flee, not fight. We watch him go and she turns her smile to me. She’s a pretty woman, green eyes, black hair, tan skin, and she certainly is fit, like a cheerleader from a movie. I wouldn’t know what one looked like in person; I never went to high school.
“Don’t mind him. Once a Marine always a Marine. I’m Domino. What’s your name?” she asks in a pleasant tone. I can almost imagine us as friends out for a walk… in the desert.
Warning, atmospheric toxins detected, switching to internal air supply. Twenty minutes remaining.
The red clock flashes at me while I watch it tick down. Normally I wouldn’t need compressed air to breathe. I built the suit to filter out most things and auto-switch me to internal when needed. The warning happens when Epic thinks I might be in dangerous air which cannot be filtered.
Is she emitting some kind of mind-controlling pheromone? Is that why Force stood down the way he did? I realize she’s still waiting for an answer.
“Cat got your tongue? Or do you not have a name?”
Her smile is all white teeth and red lips. Even after the obvious effort she undertook to bring down Grappler she doesn’t have so much as an eyelash out of place. The friendly tone remains but the feelings vanish.
My back bristles a little at that. I grasp for the first thing in my head, “Arsenal, I’m Arsenal.”
She nods. I have to admit it isn’t bad, and I have been adding weapon systems and I do plan on a few more. There are worse names I could have come up with.
“You know, doing this sort of thing,” she waves around at the villains, “requires training and a license. Technically I should ask you for yours since this is a government operation.”
I knew this would be a thing, and I’m ready for it.
“As you might have guessed, I’m new to all this. I believe I fall under the sixty-day grace period?”
It’s in the law. It’s supposed to cover people whose powers express, and they haven’t figured out if they want to be a costumed hero or something more normal. Of course, I don’t have any powers, only my suit.
Her eyebrow shoots up, “Oh, you sound like you planned this out pretty good then. Do you have an idea of what you are going to do next? I think we could fit you in on a probationary status if you need a sponsor.”
I must have impressed her if they’re offering me a spot on the team. I do the mental math on my timetable. I was planning on spending at least a year making a name for myself. I could go with the Diamondbacks now, but would it help me? Or hurt me? She mistakes my pause as hesitation.
“Listen, we’re not as strict as we let on. The DMHA may have authority, but it is mostly for show. We’re not Federal employees. Technically, we answer to the State of Arizona first and everyone else second.”
She pulls out a small card from somewhere and holds it out to me, it has a domino mask on it, her name, address of their HQ, and a phone number.
“Swing by tomorrow afternoon and at least check the place out. We’ve got a pool…”
I nod as I take the card. I have nowhere to put it. I look down at it for a second.
“Epic, record,” I say to him.
He flashes a picture from the two-gigapixel cameras I built into the helmet. I really don’t have anywhere to put the card. I clutch it in my hand until I can toss it.
Turning the PA back on I address her, “I will. Three o’clock okay?”
She nods.
Without further conversation, I ignite the thrusters on my boots and surge into the air. This has to be my favorite part of the armor. If there was a way to experience the wind against my face it would be even better. However, if any part of the armor is detached the whole thing suffers. I can open my faceplate but I lose the neural link if I do so. I let the card fall from my hand when I’m a half mile away. I wouldn’t put it past them to try and track me. Which is why I took off in the opposite direction I came from.
An idea hits me like a lightning bolt. I need stealth tech. Why hadn’t it occurred to me before? I shake my head. For a smart person, sometimes I’m really dumb.
Now I’m on the radar. Quite literally in fact. Alarms go off as my electronic warfare suite detects the radar waves bouncing off me in different directions. Right now, my cross pattern isn’t too big, but with some modifications, I bet I could make it nonexistent.
I angle my arms up a little more with the palms facing up while cutting speed. I slide down slowly. The altimeter on my HUD sinks to three hundred feet before the radar warning light goes off. Good to know the movies have it wrong. They always say five hundred.
Rows of houses and lawns pass underneath me as I wake up the dogs with my thrusters. Until I install sound baffles there isn’t a lot to be done about the noise.
Since I’m already thinking about adding systems, I should also consider a more powerful weapon. Everything I had worked great in the last fight. Looking over the telemetry I notice the kinetic lance lost more energy in the conversion than I had calculated. I dislike the idea of lethal weapons, but I might have to put at least one on the suit, for emergencies.
Now if there was only a way to cram another power cell into it…
5
Staying up all night to design a new power cell to fit around my hips wasn’t the brightest thing I could have done, especially since I was meeting the new team today. I wake with drool on my cheek and the side of my face is numb from where I fell asleep on the desk. I stretch to work out the kinks. It had to be nine or ten; I never sleep in past… it’s two-thirty!
Crap.
I shuck my clothes as fast as I can. My foot gets caught on my jeans and I end up struggling with them. Hurry it up, Amelia. It never ceases to amaze me how I can change clothes every day with no problems, and then when I need to do it in a hurry they find a way to be stuck on the chair. Deep breaths calm me down. I look at the calendar. This could move everything up by years. My synth suit goes on next. It’s considerably easier to put on; I must be getting used to wearing it. The front seals shut from crotch to neck and once the seam hits the top it melds in the reverse. With it complete, it is a one-piece suit which will only come off if my hands. Only Epic can remove it without my permission.
The armor flies off the rack and wraps around me like a second skin. Sadly, the new innovations will have to wait. For now it’s the same old, same old. The HUD lights up as Epic loads my OS and does the preflight to make sure the seal is solid. I get the green light and I’m gone, blasting into the air right out my skylight which closes automatically behind me.
They have their base in North Phoenix, about twenty miles from my house. I head east at three hundred feet, cruising at two-hundred mph for four miles before I bank hard North, slow down to one-fifty and glide up to eight-hundred feet.
My arms are sore from all the flying I did yesterday. The suit might make me marginally stronger than I am normally, but I still have to fight the air to maneuver in any way.
On course, now it gives me a few minutes to think. If I join the Diamondbacks how likely am I to be n
oticed by the national team? According to all my research, the Brigade is the team who works the closest with Category-7, my father’s former employer and the company responsible for ruining my life. Normally I try to push these thoughts aside, to focus on the mission. Not today. Today I need to look at it with a clear head. I pull up the newspaper article from the worst day of my short life. I know some would laugh and say, “How can a twenty-year-old girl know anything about pain?”
Fourteen years ago next month, my parents were taken from me.
My father worked for Category-7, the largest contractor for the government-run super teams. They build containment devices, run the UltraMax in North Dakota, they even provide the hoverbikes most of the non-flyers on the state militias use. They have their fingers in everything.
My dad loved his job, I remember that. I was six when we went on a surprise vacation to Southern California. We were driving along Pacific Coast Highway when a tire blew and our car went over the cliff. I faded in and out for hours, but at some point, men in uniforms with Cat-7 badges showed up and took my parents. They were alive and talking when the men from the company showed up. Why had they left me? I don’t know. When I woke up in the hospital, every doctor, nurse, and person I saw told me the same thing: both my parents had been killed. It was a tragic accident, no one was responsible. I was six, and from that moment to now everyone I’ve ever known, with the exception of Carlos, has lied to me about it.
In the end, we buried two empty caskets. Uncle Inezo, mom’s older brother, was the only family member who would take me in. His drinking was a problem but other than that he was nice enough when he was sober. He lied to me too. He would tell me they were dead and I just had to move on with my life. The day I turned Epic on was the happiest day of my life. I finally had a friend who believed me… and I had to make him.
Full Metal Superhero Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 3