Prime Identity

by Robert Schmitt

  “I—”

  “Weren’t you telling me just the other day that you can’t sleep on your stomach anymore because your boobs get in the way?”

  “Well, yeah. They hurt sometimes, but—”

  “And, from what you said a week ago, it sounds like Jake appreciates your boobs.”

  “That... doesn’t have anything to do with this.” I tried to stop my face from burning at the way she was smirking.

  “Didn’t you mention the other day that, for being stuck as a woman, you were glad you... ‘had a nice rack,’ as you put it?”

  “Okay. I did say that. But that doesn’t mean...” I struggled to find the right words to say. She just grinned. “Come on, Kiara. I’m still me.”

  “That’s fine.” She shrugged and tapped the steering wheel with her fingers. “You’re just one of the guys.” She looked out the windshield and took in a deep breath. “Just one of the guys with a thirty-two-C bra.”

  “Are you—”

  “Flames, G’s, do you copy?”

  My head snapped to the radio console, and I reached over and grabbed the microphone.

  “G’s here. What’ve we got?”

  My eyes met Kiara’s as the dispatch officer explained the call that had just come in. There was a break-in underway at one of the tech labs only a few blocks from us involving some high-powered rogues. She gunned the gas as I clipped the microphone back onto the radio console.

  “Epsilon Corp.” She frowned, repeating the name of the tech firm where we were headed. “That’s the place that ended up with most of the tech we confiscated from Doctor Quantum’s lab, isn’t it?”

  “I think so.” I nodded as a small worm of uncertainty wiggled its way into my mind. “You don’t think this has anything to do with the Syndicate, do you?”

  “I’m not sure.” She grit her teeth and sped around another vehicle.

  I braced myself against the door and dashboard as we slid through another intersection at breakneck speed.

  “Okay.” She shoved the car into park as we skidded to a halt in front of one of the many high-rise buildings in the tech center downtown. “I don’t think it would be a good idea for us to split up on this one, given we know there are Class A’s in there.”

  I agreed and slipped my helmet on before getting out of the car. “Collateral on this could be bad. Let’s go.”

  We made our way into the building. She used a standard badge that arbiters carried to interface with the security system and let us pass. The doors unlocked a second later. As we got onto the elevator up to the floor where the security system had tripped, I checked through the safety systems of my suit out of habit.

  As the elevator doors opened onto the floor of the lab, we heard faint voices echoing through the hallway. Without a moment’s hesitation, the two of us stepped off the elevator and started jogging toward the noise. As we passed dozens of glass doors on either side of us, Kiara unsheathed the longsword hanging from her back.

  “You think you’ll actually use that this time?” I asked, my eyes on the gleaming metal as she rolled it with her wrist.

  “Hope not. Whole idea behind having it is that I won’t have to use it, right?”

  “Right. Otherwise, why not just use a gun?”

  “Yep. Also, you know, swords are cool.”

  We came to a stop near the end of the hallway, where one of the glass doors had been shattered. With a confirmatory glance, we walked over the broken glass to enter the laboratory.

  “Arbiters present!” Her shout echoed around the room as we entered. “Whoever is in here, come out with your hands behind your head!”

  Something crashed near the back of the room behind a bank of computers. Reaching out through spacetime, I could see a group of masses moving around where the crash had come from.

  “There are four...” I tilted my head toward the noise, but then sensed something I hadn’t expected. The number of bodies there was... growing. “Wait. Now I count seven? Nine?”

  “Sounds like a multiplier.” She smiled. “Oh, this is going to be fun.”

  She gripped her sword more tightly as she strode forward. With a flash of light, the edges of the sword lit on fire as she accelerated the molecules of the metal until it was hot enough to light the accelerant on her blade. I followed and made sure to keep some distance from her, as she within seconds seemed to be completely composed of flame.

  As we edged around the bank of computers, a mob of men came into view, though all of them looked identical.

  “This is your last chance,” she warned, her voice snapping and roiling much like the flames flickering across her body. “Surrender now, or we will use lethal force.”

  “Every time,” all the men said simultaneously, the same frustrated expression flashing across their faces. “It’s always the same. Do they give you guys lines to say?”

  “There are some more in the other room.” I twisted my head to our right, where I sensed more bodies.

  “Go check it out,” she said. “This joker shouldn’t take long.”

  The man laughed as I turned and bounded away toward where I had sensed the other movement, though his laughter choked into a gurgled scream in a deadly flash of speed only seconds later. I didn’t think about the bloody and seared pile of bodies I knew for certain were lying on the floor behind me. I had seen Kiara’s work too many times before to doubt her efficiency. She never used more force than necessary, but by the same token, she was rarely merciful.

  I pushed the side door to the other room open, only to be momentarily blinded by the light streaming in from beyond. As I blinked to clear my vision, I made out a group of five people ransacking the room, tossing files, disks, and even the strange instruments on the counters of the room onto the floor in the middle of the room.

  “You’re under arrest,” I announced, then twisted up the gravity in the room to five times its normal level.

  I had enough experience by then busting illegal activity to have some idea what might happen. Most primes, unless physically augmented by their powers, would be unable to stand under five times their own weight. I anticipated at least one of the people in the room would be a rogue with a ranged ability, and that they would try and use their powers on me regardless of whether they were sandwiched into the ground or not.

  What I didn’t expect, though, was for one of the rogues to reach a hand out and form a portal on the floor in the middle of the room beneath the pile of papers, instruments, folders, and hard drives. I could feel it—even before I saw the strange shuddering edges of the portal—as an impossible rift in spacetime. The lines of spacetime from all the objects falling into the portal shifted indigo as they blinked almost instantly to a distant point far away behind me. It was an impossible anomaly, and yet, as I studied the portal in front of me in amazement, a trickle of recognition lit up my mind. She had made portals through spacetime too, hadn’t she? But they were nothing like this. They were much more...

  I snapped my head up at the heavy growling coming from somewhere to my left, only a few feet away. I barely had time to react as something massive and furry barreled into me and knocked me back against the nearby counter.

  I pushed out a bubble of negative spacetime around me that I hoped was strong enough to keep whatever had just plowed into me away. Without the time to shape my blast into only a narrow band, though, the ripple of spacetime expanded outward in every direction, blowing everything away from me in a miniature detonation.

  The room was demolished by the blast. All the nearby panels on the counters splintered inward from the shockwave, and anything loose in the room that hadn’t been sucked into the portal was now embedded into the walls. The people in the room were likewise slammed into the walls and counters, though the ones farther from me fared better than those nearest me. The woman next to where I had landed ended up half-shoved through the wall twenty feet away.

  The creature that had tackled me was the first to get back to its feet. If it was able to move ar
ound under a force five times greater than normal gravity, I was sure it wasn’t going to be put out of commission by a mere blast like that.

  As we studied each other, the best I could think was the thing in front of me was some demonic cross between a bear on steroids and a really mean wolf.

  “Morpher, right?” I wheezed and pushed myself to my feet.

  In response, the thing only lifted its upper lip at me and snarled. The sound reverberated deep in my chest. I didn’t think much of it as the man nearest to the creature stuck his hand out and gripped the creature by one of its legs. While the sounds of bones cracking and popping filled the air, he changed shape, his body turning from male to female in the span of a second. Before I had the time to blink, the newly turned woman smiled at me and transformed yet again—into an identical bear-wolf hybrid.

  “Son of a—”

  My words were cut short as both creatures pushed off from the ground and rocketed forward on a collision course with me. I just had time to think through snapping the spacetime around me to bring me up near the ceiling of the room milliseconds before both creatures would have slammed into me. Still, I wasn’t fast enough. Pain seared across my left side as one of the creatures raked a clawed hand along my side from behind my shoulder blade down to my hip. The other snapped its head forward, closing its jaws around my right ankle and clamping down with enough force that something in my foot broke with a sickening crunch.

  I stifled a scream, pain racing up from my leg and side. I looked between my bloodied and shredded boot, across to my side where my suit had been torn open into three bloodied gashes, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before the pain became unbearable. My suit was designed to handle knife blades. The fact those claws and teeth had pierced through it didn’t bode well for my chances of surviving another assault from them. Apart from that, once the pain had time to set in, I wouldn’t have the fortitude to use my powers with much control, and that would mean things were going to get messier for everyone. I had to act fast.

  I held out a hand and ripped the spacetime surrounding the two beasts backward. They were knocked flat as they slammed into the wall behind them. The thin sheetrock walls of the room shredded apart from the impact, though one of the creatures had the misfortune of hitting a section of wall reinforced by a foot-wide steel I-beam. It crumpled down to the ground with its limbs splayed limply around the metal bar. A second later, its fur retracted back into its body to reveal the shrinking form of a woman. What little clothes that were still on her were in tatters.

  The other beast came to a rolling stop somewhere in the room beyond, and as I watched, it pushed itself to its feet, only to have a flaming sword swing down and halt an inch from its neck.

  “Change back,” Kiara said through gritted teeth. “Don’t make me do something we’ll both regret.”

  For a second, I thought the thing was going to try and break free, but then its body shrank back into the form of the same nearly-naked woman slumped around the I-beam. Another moment later, her form expanded slightly as she turned back into her original body, that of a man’s. Kiara pulled her sword away.

  “Watch out!” I shouted as, in a burst of motion, the man reached out and gripped Kiara by the wrist. He smiled despite the flames licking at his hand, and a second later, his body ground once again into a new shape as he turned into an exact copy of Kiara.

  “Goodnight.” Kiara smiled, her eyebrows flashing as she nodded to the copycat’s side. As I followed her gaze, I saw a syringe hanging out of her clone's flesh. The rogue fell to the ground a moment later, already reverting to his original form.

  “Replicators.” She huffed and stepped past the naked man sprawled out at her feet.

  I turned my attention back to the remaining three people in the room, who had been trying to scuttle away during my brief struggle with the two creatures. My eyes went wide as the man who had made the portal only seconds before reached his hand out and I sensed the same spacetime rift begin to form at his feet.

  “Not this time,” I said through a stilted breath. With a shove of my power, I warped the spacetime around the rift back to its normal shape, which collapsed the portal. The man, who already had one foot in the portal when it snapped away into non-existence, screamed as the portal disappeared and took his foot with it.

  After such a gruesome display, the other two rogues didn’t need much convincing that it would be better for them to surrender. I waited for the minute or so it took Kiara to put both power-nullifying clamps and handcuffs on the six rogues we had found in the lab, then turned my attention to my injuries.

  “Can you walk?” Kiara asked a few minutes later, after an arbiter collection team had arrived. I tried to ignore them as they bustled through the lab, tending to injuries and collecting the neutralized rogues.

  “Don’t think so.” I bit down on my lower lip to keep myself from crying out as I tried to put pressure on my injured foot.

  “That morph-form was really something, wasn’t it?”

  She clicked her tongue, her brow furrowed as she inspected the gashes in my side. There was a thick line of blood pooling at the bottom of the torn fabric, and glancing down, I saw a sizable puddle of blood was already collecting around my boot.

  “Pity she didn’t decide to try life on the right side of the law, huh?”

  “Yeah.” I squeezed my eyes shut as one of the EMPs stuck an injection of painkillers into my side. I grit my teeth and forced in a sharp breath as he pressed what looked like a thick, gooey gauze pad into my side where the gashes were. A moment later, my flesh began to tingle and burn from contact with the foamy pad. “Jake’s going to kill me for shredding this suit.”

  “You kidding?” She laughed. “I’ll send that suit to one of my techies, and by tomorrow it’ll be good as new. Jake did way worse than that on the first day of my internship. It’s going to be fine. I doubt you'll even have a scar to show by tomorrow.”

  “You didn’t stop us.” A gravelly voice broke through our conversation.

  “What?” I twisted my head toward the sound but regretted it immediately as my vision swirled from the cocktail of painkillers hitting my system.

  “We got what we came for,” the man said. He stopped in front of us as he was being led out of the room by a pair of burly men. “You’ve done nothing but delay us, at most. You can’t stop what we are accomplishing.”

  “Okay.” Kiara rolled her eyes, then nodded to the two men escorting him out.

  “The Syndicate sends its regards, Gravita,” the man called, even as he was pushed out of the room.

  “Damn.” She sighed. “I was really hoping this wasn’t them. Oh well. Who needs sleep anyway, right?”

  “What are you talking about?” My voice was muffled for a second as I pulled my helmet off. “I’m not sleepy at all.”

  “Wow.” She laughed and leaned over me, then drew her hand across my forehead to tuck the stray hairs hanging down my face behind my ear. “You really don’t handle painkillers that well, do you?”

  “No way!” I blinked forcefully and frowned as I stared back at her. “I’m fine with painkillers.”

  “Maybe before.” She sighed and shook her head. “I guess what they say about redheads and painkillers is true, huh?”

  “I’m not a...” I paused and reached up to pull some of my hair into view, then laughed. “Oh. I guess I am.”

  “Come on.” She laughed too, then hoisted my right arm over her shoulders to help me to my feet. “Let’s get you back to the hub before those painkillers wear off, okay?”

  “Whatever you say, man.”

  14

  “HERE.” I FROWNED AND tapped the eraser on the end of my pencil onto the table. “I think this is where you’re getting off track. You’d be better off solving the centripetal force in terms of angular velocity instead of finding a flat tangential force. That will help with the second part of the problem.”

  “This is hopeless.” Sam buried her head in her hands.

 
; “Come on.” I shook her by the shoulder. “What kind of an attitude is that? You can do this. It’s just physics.”

  “Just physics?” She scowled at me. “Just physics?”

  “It’s applied math. You just have to think through the problem.”

  “Maybe I just need to ask dad,” she muttered under her breath. “He’s the physics major.”

  “Hey, I took physics in college, too.” I frowned.

  “Your degree’s in history.”

  “I got a double-degree. I took physics courses in college for my computer systems degree. How do you think I met your mother?”

  She grumbled something under her breath and pulled the paper out from in front of me. “I’ll try it again in radians per second, instead of meters per second.”

  “What are you guys doing?” Alan asked as he came into the kitchen.

  “Homework.” I spared him a glance as he turned away from the fridge with a soda in hand.

  “Hey!” He threw his hands up as the can floated out of reach and settled on the top of the fridge.

  “Come on.” I got up from the table to peer into the oven. “You know the rule. No food or snacks until dinner.”

  He scowled at me as he poured himself a glass of water.

  “How’s that problem coming?” I turned to Sam.

  “I think I got it.”

  “Awesome.” I pulled a vegetable platter out of the fridge. “Speaking of, Alan, do you have any homework?”

  “My teachers didn’t give me homework over Thanksgiving.” He pulled up a chair at the table next to Sam. “Unlike some people.”

  I glanced toward the two of them in time to see her stick her tongue out at her brother.

  “Mom?” He frowned as he studied me. “Are you wearing makeup?”

  “Is she?” Sam twisted around, her eyes on me.

  “It’s Thanksgiving, isn’t it?” I gestured down at the blouse and skirt I had on. “We dress up for dinner, and unfortunately, that means I get to wear makeup and a skirt.”