“Amelia?” Tia’s voice comes to me over the comms.
I quickly tell her where to go in order to hook up with Kate. “Make sure the police know to clear the area as far out as they can, got it?”
“Si,” she says before hanging up.
She will need at least five minutes to meet Kate.
“Okay, let’s see if we can’t show the Red Wizard the way back to Thay.”
I do not think that was funny.
“Maybe you had to be there.”
151
Another building crumbles from Robo-Rex’s attempt to punch me. Red brick and glass shower the area as I fly three hundred miles an hour, ten feet off the ground. I pull up hard, grunting from the g’s and put everything I’ve got into a climb just under his head. The front of my armor screams from the impact as I hit his jaw in a massive, full body uppercut, enhanced by the compressed coils.
The head jerks back as I fly off, the world flashing by as colors cloud my vision from the excessive g’s. “Okay, let’s not do that again.”
You did manage to stagger him. Also, the flame breath has not fired again for several minutes. It may be depleted or recharging.
“That’s comforting. Has he said anything else in the last few minutes?” I ask as I bring the armor up in a wide loop, twisting at the end so I’m hovering in the air a few hundred feet above him and a thousand feet away.
Negative.
Nothing I’m using seems to really hurt him. The hole I made with the tank missile has vanished—a self-repair routine I imagine. I get that this guy is a conjurer, and he seems to have imbued this robot with life, somehow… but the sheer level of engineering required to construct this thing is beyond anything I’ve ever even imagined… and I can imagine an awful lot.
Sensors are still unable to penetrate the hull.
“Epic, we don’t have the time right now, but there has to be something else we’re missing. This thing came from somewhere. Make sure to check on the sublevels beneath the docks. There has to be an engineering bay or something. He built it somewhere, somehow. Or someone did… I don’t think it was Rafael.”
Amelia, he has recharged his heat beams and he is aiming for the downtown core. They have not evacuated all of it.
“Oh no. Epic, full throttle!”
Power diverted.
The air shakes around us as we pass through the sound barrier. I can see the red lines forming on his back, the massive head swinging around to vaporize the core of the city. Epic shows me the numbers at tens of thousands of projected casualties. He’s willing to be the greatest single mass-murderer in history if it means the end of the superheroes.
What is your plan?
“I was hoping you would have one,” I tell him as I flip the suit over to dodge Robo-Rex’s tail. I swoop under his arm and throw everything I have into reverse. The suit roars to a halt in front of his open mouth… I have a really good view of the several elements heating up in his throat, and even this far away the heat alarms scream at me.
“Shut those damn alarms off…”
Shut? Shut his mouth!
I kill the thrust, dropping suddenly, then I go full afterburners, blasting right up into the bottom of his jaw, arms out, pushing. I’m close enough now that instead of bouncing off from the momentum, I lift.
Actuators scream and even through the Emdrive’s whine I can hear metal sheer and bolts pop. Something inside gives, and the jaw snaps shut, shooting me forward like a rubber band. Heat blooms in his mouth for a second before Rafael shuts down the weapon. Smoke, like dragon’s breath, pours out of the gaps in his teeth.
“Okay, how long do you think we have before the self-repair fixes that?”
Not long. On the good side, Kate and Tia are now together at the pre-arranged location.
“Time to end this.” The suit protests as I pull a hard turn, grunting from the gees and the exertion. My whole body—well, what I can feel—is just ready to be done. I’m gonna sleep for a week when this is over… or forever, depending on how the next two minutes go.
It only takes a minute to find the two women. They’re waiting for me only a few blocks from where we were first attacked, what seems like a lifetime ago. I hit the roof hard, sending up a spray of gravel and dust.
“Faceplate up.” The plate slides up revealing my face to Tia. She smiles and nods.
“This is a good look for you, Amelia.”
“Thanks,” I take a knee as I speak. “Listen, how tired are you?” I ask Tia.
“Exhausted,” she says, running a hand through her dirty hair. “I need about a month of sleep and a million calories.”
I nod. “Me too. I have a plan, but I need you to mass up as much as you can. And… it might be dangerous.”
Kate laughs. “‘Might be dangerous?’ Amelia, what do you think we’ve been doing all night?”
“I know, but I had to say it.”
“I’m in. What do you want me to do?” Tia asks.
“Clench up, and when I say, put on the weight.” The faceplate closes back over my face and I walk around to stand behind Tia.
“Amelia,” Kate says, reaching for both of us in an awkward hug that doesn’t quite go around my armor. “Be safe.”
I want to say something back to her, but my throat seizes up. Instead, I give her a nod. The Emdrive whines as we blast off toward the sky. I can’t go too fast, because of Tia, so I hit one-fifty and put the cruise control on.
“Are you okay?” I ask her in a yell. I’ve got an iron grip around her chest and waist to protect her. There’s no chance of her falling, but going this fast without a suit or invulnerability can be disturbing.
“Si,” she yells with a nod of her head.
We hit five thousand feet and I loop us over.
Amelia, you remember when I said that your previous plan was unnecessarily dangerous?
“Yeah,” I tell him. “Tia, mass up. As much as you can!”
I stand corrected. This is the most dangerous thing you have ever done.
“More dangerous than unleashing a black hole?”
The second most dangerous thing you have done.
“See? We’ll be fine.”
I hit the drive, dumping every ounce of power into the Emdrive, shooting us straight down at Robo-Rex. The air ripples around us as Tia increases her mass and weight. The sensors in the suit don’t know how to deal with the sudden change.
“You might want to curl up,” I tell her. She adjusts, bringing her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around them, bowing her head and forming as much of a wrecking ball as she can. I try to reposition as best I can. All I can do is slow down for a second, get behind her and push.
Amelia, she is now more massive than a train. Are you sure this will work?
“Not like I can stop this now. Fire the tank missiles!” I close my eyes trusting Epic to guide us in. Please, oh please let this work. The Gatling vibrates, thumping against my back as it shoots three tank missiles down toward him. On the fourth one, the mechanism rips off and falls behind us with a screech of tearing metal.
I hear the roar of Robo-Rex over the whine. Heat alarms wail at me as he unleashes a blast in our direction. I know she’s nearly impervious to physical harm when she’s like this, but heat is different. She screams as her clothes burn off. Her flesh begins to cook.
I put more power into the kinetic shields than I’ve ever done, tasking nearly the entire ZPFM to create a wedge to protect both her and me.
Then we hit.
The impact is tremendous. Metal and armor explode like glass. The sheer weight of her transfers enough energy into the robot’s superstructure that every joint explodes in a second. Three seconds later we crash through the underside into the ground… and keep going.
I groan as the journey finally stops. Warning alarms flash and scream in my ear. The suit is toast—nearly half the systems are off-line. It’s all I can do to throw myself over her as proximity alarms warn of imminent danger.
&
nbsp; Then Robo-Rex explodes. The force of the blast compresses the air, slamming into me like an anvil. I scream as something inside me breaks. Then a hand covers my visor and for a second everything goes white…
152
I swear they should name a room in the hospital after me. Lying there with my eyes closed, as I dredge my way up to full consciousness, I take a moment to enjoy the floaty feeling of painkillers. The tap of keys tells me I’m not alone in the room. If I had to guess…
“Kate?” I manage to croak out. I try to turn my head but the angry tendons in my neck refuse to work and punish me with pain.
“Don’t try to move, hon. You’re hurt pretty bad,” she says. A cool hand rests against my forehead and warm fuzzy feelings flow into me from her. Her whammy washes over me and most of the pain fades. Things don’t work— I can’t lift my arms or turn my head—but at least the angry throbbing is gone.
“Thanks,” I say to her and try to smile. At least it works a little. “Is Tia okay?” I close my eyes, trying to block out the last thing I saw of her, smoking and burned as she huddled under my armor.
“She’s fine. As soon as the Thunder Lizard went down, I could teleport again. I got you and her out of there before the real fireworks started. It only took me a minute to grab Teddy from Seattle and he’s been with you ever since.”
My heart thumps, ever since? Oh no—
“Calm down, Amelia. It’s only been a week. You’re fine.”
I nod, maybe. I think I do, anyway. “What happened?”
“After you destroyed Robo-Rex the rest of his organization gave up. The local authorities are in the process of rounding them all up,” she tells me.
I nod. The hollow pit in my stomach shouldn’t be there. After all, we won, right? Kate leans down and gives me a kiss on my forehead.
“You’ll feel better after some more sleep,” Kate tells me. I start to protest but she touches my face and I’m out.
Epilogue
All the tests I can run tell me the same thing. This is my armor. Courtesy of Tia, I have a chunk of the Robo-Rex from the fight down in Buenos Aires. It’s certainly mine. Right down to the crystalline matrix and the way the titanium and tungsten bond.
Except… that’s not possible. I don’t mean the friendly sort of I don’t understand how that is possible. But the straight-up ‘impossible as in it can’t happen.’
But here it is. It’s like someone stuck a piece of my armor into a machine that copied it a hundred times on the molecular level.
Luke is asking for permission to come in. Shall I grant his request?
“Of course. Take the permission protocol off, for now, I’ve made my point—I hope.” I roll over to the other workstation, where the red gem from Rafael’s cane rests. This was slightly harder to procure. I’m treating it like a hazardous material, so no touching with bare hands.
The smell of fennel sausage and the most wonderful mozzarella to grace our Earth hits my nose. My mouth immediately seizes control of my brain and I spin around in place.
“You brought me Bianco’s?” I ask the super-marine.
“Of course I did. After all. I love—” He stops mid-sentence his eyes going wide. “What is that?” He puts the pizza down, forgotten as he walks toward the gem in a stupor.
“Uh, Luke, hello?” I wave my hand in front of him, but he just brushes by me, stopping only when his hips hit the cabinet. He’s freaking me out and my brain is sending all kinds of alarms at me. “Luke?”
He doesn’t answer as he stares, mouth open, eyes wide at the gem.
“I need to touch it,” he whispers.
Okay, that is a VERY bad idea. “Epic, lockdown!”
Red lights flash and alarms sound as every workstation recedes into the wall. All of them, except the one Luke is holding on to.
“Luke? Luke? Get a hold of yourself.” My heart’s pounding as I wheel over and grab his arm—for all the good it will do me.
He looks down at my hands, eyes filled with cold contempt as he swats me aside. I forget how frigging strong he is. The blow sends me flying out of my chair, sliding across the cold floor on my sore shoulder.
“Kate!” I scream. It’s too late. He tears the containment lid off the gem, reaching in to grasp it with his bare hand. Kate appears next to me, claws out ready to strike.
“Amelia, Luke? What’s going on?”
Luke pulls the gem out, holding it in his hand like it’s the Ark of the Covenant.
Then he’s gone… vanished in a flash of red light.
“Luke?” I scream into the empty room. “Luke!”
UNTIL NEXT TIME…
Part VI
Explosive Arsenal
Full Metal Superhero book 6
Explosive Arsenal Copyright © 2018 by Jeffery H. Haskell.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Jeffery H. Haskell
Visit my website at www.jefferyhhaskell.com
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing: Sep 2018
Molten Press
ISBN: 9781790336920
There are so many people who help and support me I can’t even begin to recognize all of them here. This one, though, is for the fans. Thank you for letting me tell stories for a living.
153
Luke is gone. Taken. At the Spire everyone looks to me for answers and I don’t have any. Which is why I’m flying over the desert with nothing but scrub brush and cacti as far as the eye can see. I need quiet to think, and it doesn’t get any quieter than this.
I set the armor down in a swirl of sand and scattering Leopard lizards, then let the engines wind down and allow the quiet to invade my thoughts for a few seconds before I speak.
“Epic, will you walk me through this one more time?” I ask my faithful AI companion. Epic and I have been together a long time. I trust him to set me straight.
The gem emanates a low-level RF emission that can best be described as an alpha wave. When Luke entered the room he must have been a match for the gem’s alpha wave emissions. It ‘locked’ on and—in essence—overrode his brain.
I try to wrap my head around this. Even if I were a match it wouldn’t affect me. I have too many fail-safes for mind control, including an ECM barrier built into my chair. When I’m sitting in it, I’m encompassed in a rolling Faraday cage that would prevent just such a thing from happening.
But Luke...
I came out here to think, away from the team and the enquiring eyes of the staff. They all look to me for answers and I don’t have any for them. At least now I know the “how.”
It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours since he vanished. The first twenty-four are crucial to finding a missing person. Luke, though, isn’t missing per se. He ran off, sort of.
Alpha waves beg the question... “Can we track them?”
I can use a number of open-source RF antennas to look for the right emissions, but they are few and far between. It is too faint for us to track from Artemis. Luke would virtually have to walk by a scanner for us to detect him. I will start scanning immediately of course. I am also using Internet tracking algorithms to look for any trace of him. If he appears in a photo, is mentioned in a Facebook post, or shows up on YouTube, I will know about it.
I kick a rock in frustration, watching the object of my anger sail across the soil to land with a thud thirty feet away.
“Retract helmet,” I order. The faceplate shifts up and folds into the helmet, which then pulls
down into the shoulders of the armor. I’m wearing my flight variant—one of a variety of different versions now available, all based around the same core design. This suit has minimal weapons but allows for faster flight than any of my other suits. It’s also the nimblest of them, making me feel like I’m hardly wearing anything on top of my clothes.
I take a deep breath and try to relax. Try to clear my mind and see a solution. But I can’t. All I can see is the look on Luke’s face. It’s like he was crazed. Please oh please let his mind be okay? God, what if it erased him the way Ericsson took over people? No… no, I can’t think like that.
“Helmet on,” I say as I mentally engage the Emdrive. In my new suit, I have the base core of Animetal connecting it to me like tendons in a body. Which means I have the enhanced strength of my Animetal armor and some of the nerve control as well, allowing me a finer degree of control than my standard suit.
The only other way to simulate strength was with my kinetic manipulators—which works, but not exactly the way I want. The solution with the Animetal core ends up being the best of both worlds: it has the hard shell of my old armor on top of my kinetic shields, plus the strength and reinforced superstructure of my Animetal armor.
I miss being able to control everything mentally. The way the new version of the synthsuit combines with my Animetal tendons, I can only control some of the suit with nerve impulses—primarily flight. Everything else uses my eye-tracking HUD or voice commands.
A layer of computronium in the suit allows Epic to travel with me… to keep Argentina from ever happening again. I have a version of my suit that folds into a wheelchair and one on the Emjet on top of my quantum room. No matter where I go, I will always have a suit with me—I won’t rely on just one delivery method anymore, nor on only having one suit. I also try to keep at least twenty percent of Epic’s computational power working on new designs night and day.
Full Metal Superhero Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 81