Her relatives tried to calm her, and I felt my lips tighten. “Escala!” I shouted, moving to her. “Mally’s still out there?”
“Yes!”
“Then let’s go find her!” I turned around, ignoring Mary’s shouts, dodging Benny’s outstretched arm, and ran back into the jungle. Escala caught up to me within seconds, moving with all the lean muscle that her people’s life had given her. I noticed that somewhere she’d picked up a knife, and then I was too busy dodging trees to pay much more attention to her.
The barrage lightened, or so I thought. The explosions were fewer and far between now. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted longer than a few minutes,but the devastation was horrific. Burning trees belched black smoke into the sky, and the smoking ruins of buildings lay scattered across the main circle of the village. Bodies were everywhere... rebels and Chamis alike, united in death. I scanned them with as much dispassion as I could muster, avoiding the faces. I was looking for a child-sized corpse.
Some of them weren’t quite dead, and I closed my heart to their pleas as they thrashed in the dirt, bleeding from gaping wounds, spurting from stumps of limbs, or screaming without faces. Not for the first time, I mourned my complete inability to perform even basic first aid. My original self had seen fit to scrub it from my mind entirely, along with just about everything relating to medical matters. And so they died, and all I could do was move on, hope that others had followed, and could get to them in time.
“There!” Escala’s voice rose above the din. “Mally! Omya!” I whirled around, to see her running south... straight toward the beach.
“No no no...” I whispered, as I followed. The contrails in the air had all come from the south. They’d shelled us from across the bay, and Escala would be exposed on the beach. This was not optimal. Stuck as I was I followed, hoping she hadn’t been mistaken, hoping to get Mally and Escala back before some artillerist noticed them out in the open.
We broke through the treeline, free of the smoke, to see Omya out on the beach, Mally clinging tightly to her back. The older woman waved and called out to the sea... and to the speedboat I saw cutting through the waves. A low vessel, flying a Mariposan flag. Armed and armored, clearly one of Corazon’s converted patrol boats. “We surrender! Please!” Omya’s voice drifted back to me...
...and with horror I saw a deck-mounted grenade launcher swivel around, and the soldier behind it take aim.
“No!” Escala shouted, and ran toward the boat, screaming as she dove for her child with a flying tackle that would have done a linebacker proud. I pushed myself into motion, but I was behind, too far behind, and there were too many yards between us.
Time slowed. And I remembered that the shield generator in my pocket was shaped just right for throwing.
I skidded to a stop, jerked it from my pocket, and hurled it as far as I could toward Mally.
The deck gun fired. The beach exploded.
Omya fell, blood spraying over Escala. Escala tackled Mally to the ground. And then I was there, skidding on my knees to a painful stop in front of them, praying the shield was in the right spot.
Another explosion... that rebounded from the shield, scant inches from my face.
Silence rushed in, and I closed my eyes as Omya gurgled her last in front of me. I hadn’t known her well, but this was a pointless death at best. Some part of me was screaming, deep inside, but I pushed it away and took a deep breath.
There came a sobbing from beside me, and for a second I couldn’t place the voice. I knew, I knew in my heart that tragedy had struck another blow, and I couldn’t bring myself to look. The second I looked it would become real, and I didn’t want to lose another friend. I didn’t want Escala’s vision to be true.
I didn’t want another death that I could have prevented if I’d been a few seconds faster.
I didn’t want Mally to grow up without her mother.
But I was Dire, and the only way past horror is through. So I shoved my soul down into my gut, and turned to see.
One look, and I closed my eyes, as tears welled up.
My last-ditch throw hadn’t been completely successful.
I opened them again. Escala wailed, cradling her daughter. Her daughter, whose hand had been just out of the forcefield. Who now had a bloody, spurting stump at the end of her wrist.
“No,” I whispered. My face warmed, with the effort of holding back tears. Then my hands tingled with warmth, that grew until it was uncomfortable. And the whole front of me grew hotter, as if I was staring into a blast furnace.
Belatedly I realized something was wrong, and scrambled back... and well I did, because Escala’s raw scream rose to a pitch human throats weren’t supposed to reach, right before her own hand burst into flame. In the split second before I had to turn my head away, I saw her close it around Mally’s stump, cauterizing the wound.
I grabbed the child’s leg, pulling her from her mother’s hands. I kept moving back, managing to get to her into my arms and me to my feet, turned and ran. My face felt raw, like a bad sunburn. I didn’t have time to test to see how badly I’d been hurt, or how badly Mally had been hurt, just kept moving as the fire surged higher.
Surged... oh gods. I knew what was going on, as Escala’s scream died, and the fiery figure curled around itself in a fetal position.
I was witnessing a power surge. An Origin.
At the turn of the twentieth century, this phenomenon burst into the world bringing chaos and change in its wake. The vector was still unknown, and the dispositions, genetics, or other qualifiers that made one susceptible to them remained a complete mystery, but the effects could not be denied.
One person in five hundred thousand, when subjected to almost unimaginable stress, would gain superpowers as a result.
I was one of those people, though my Origin remained a mystery to me, locked away in my mind. I’d worked with and fought others who had undergone power surges of their own. While they didn’t make up the full run of costumed metahumanity, they accounted for perhaps half of it. And now I was seeing it happen right in front of me.
Mally was maimed and in need of a doctor. Her mother’s rage had saved her, but Escala hadn’t found the off-switch yet. And now Escala literally burned in front of me, so hot she turned sand into glass as I watched.
Gunmen on the boat fired, and I saw sand kick up around her, but she didn’t seem to care. She lurched to her feet, drunkenly, and the flames receded until she looked like a humanoid figure made of roiling fire.
The guns stopped, and shouts drifted over the water. The engine cut out, and I turned in time to see it coast to a stop in the shallows. I eyed where my shield generator had fallen in the sand, and edged that way, putting us behind it before I lowered Mally to the ground.
“Cease fire! I’ll secure the burning bitch,” said deep male voice in Spanish. A handsome man in a cape climbed out of the cabin. His costume gleamed green and golden, his mask a thin domino that did nothing beyond accentuate his eyes and shield his nose a bit.
He leaped to the beach, swirling his cape as he went, and grinning.
Escala charged him, howling her grief—
—and stopped cold, as he lifted a hand and twisted. She rose into the air spinning, scrambling to try to get back down to the beach.
“One more for El Jefe,” the man smirked. “Say this for this last day, it’s been profitable.”
“Profitable.” I said, reaching into my left pocket, and pulling out the tiny rod I’d taken from my lair last night. “That’s what you have to say about this mess? It’s profitable?” Sorrow mixed with rage, and rage won. “You fucking shiny-caped little bitch of a lickspittle murdering fascist, you think this tragedy is profitable?”
He glanced my way. “Shoot that one.”
Bullets rang out, and I dropped as they hit my field. I'd put it between us, of course. But they didn't know that.
He turned his attention back to Escala, then did a double take as I rolled to the side, out of the
shield, lining up just the right angle. I stabbed the rod toward him, adjusted the dial on the side for a twenty foot spread.
“What... another one?” He asked. “Wait your turn. I need to give this fire bitch a dunking.”
“Don’t bother,” I advised, aiming carefully. Then I kicked my aim up a notch, to put it at a rising angle. “You’ll be dead in a second.”
“Bitch, do you know who I am?” He glared at me, ignoring Escala’s flailing as she tried to get some leverage against the thin air surrounding her. “I’m—”
“Don’t care.” I pushed the big red button.
The world became light.
Temporarily blinded as I was, I knew what was happening. Just as designed, the device in my hand discharged all the power in its microcell in one epic blast. I’d scaled it up to a twenty-foot spread, so it didn’t have quite the punch that I’d designed it to have.
Given that I’d originally designed it to knock the invincible and nigh-invulnerable metahuman known as Crusader a few thousand miles into outer space, scaling down a little bit didn’t really matter much for my current foes.
Light tore out in front of me, at an upward rising angle. It caught the telekinetic idiot square on, and the twenty-foot spread was just enough to miss Escala. It also caught most of the boat behind him, and the soldiers on deck.
From that point on, it kept on going, up until it hit the upper ionosphere and started to disperse. Which was why I’d put it at an upward angle. I didn’t want to risk hitting the city behind them. There’d been enough genocide for one day.
I dropped the smoking cylinder, as the light faded and I blinked the spots away.
Sizzling stumps of shins poking out of green boots wobbled for a second, then fell to the ground; that was all that remained of the government metahuman. The charred hull of the boat collapsed instantly, bereft of structural supports. No soldiers were left to trouble me, which was good, because this thing only had one shot to it and I’d left my pistol back in the ruined hut.
And Escala fell to the sand, her flames flickering as she propped herself up. They withdrew from her face as she stared at me, grief warring with awe.
I stared back... and then to Mally’s limp form. Sharp-eyed, smart little Mally who’d lost a hand for no reason, just like that. My stomach twisted, and I vomited into the sand. The gore I’d passed on the way here, the sudden death that had rained from the skies, the slaughter of those I’d come to regard as friends... I mourned them with each heave, and my tears slicked down my face as I shook.
“And she cast forth golden light, blazing from her hands,” Escala whispered.
I spat out bile, stared up at her through tear-streaked eyes. “What?”
“Maaya. You are Maaya returned!”
And possibilities flashed through my mind, as I considered them with my full intellect. Claiming the mantle of Maaya, breaking out the toys in my lair, and leading the Chamis to their rightful revenge. Freeing them from the yoke of oppression. Giving them a revolution of their own. God-queen righteous and terrible, uniting Chamis and Maris under her rule, and mending once more the rift that had divided them since before colonial times.
I considered the possibilities.
Then I shut the door on them. I was no Maaya, no magical savior queen reborn. I would be exploiting them no less than the Englishmen had, and the Spanish Conquistadores before them. I’d be just another white idiot taking the wheel of destiny away from them, putting herself above them for her own glory. And I’d be deceiving them to do it, too. No, the thought was intolerable.
“No,” I whispered to her, scooping up the shield generator, and then I turned and fled into the jungle. A cry from behind me, but I knew she’d be too muddled to catch up for a little while. She had powers now, and sorting those out would take time. They would slow her down, enough for me to get clean away.
And as I ran, I tapped my earrings, activating the vox. “Suru!”
“Yes Doctor?” It felt strange to hear my assistant’s mellow tones, after all the screaming and chaos of the last few— gods, had it only been six minutes? Yes, it had.
“Suru, activate the suit, and remote pilot to the following coordinates. It’s time to take out some trash.”
I would not pretend to be their golden goddess. But I could save them in my own way. Nothing I couldn’t fix with my own two hands, a half-ton suit of power armor, and a hell of a lot of sensible violence...
CHAPTER 6: ATACAR EL CORAZON
“He’d prepared for armies. He’d prepared for Special Ops teams. He’d prepared for hired assasins, and poisons, and missiles, and bombs, and even heroes. But he didn’t prepare for HER.”
--Maria Spetta, secretary to Presidente Corazon, during an interview with the newly-freed press on 21 September 2003.
The suit sealed around me, and I repressed a shiver. Once I’d taken joy in this. Once I’d only felt truly alive when surrounded by state of the art engineering that I’d crafted myself.
Once.
I looked to the ruin of the Chamis village, and felt the anger rise anew. The smoke was thick now, parts of the jungle still ablaze. Enough that Corazon’s butchers would probably hold off on further rocket barrages.
They’d sent their ‘hero’ in for cleanup, to pose with the camera crew and get some good shots as he took down the remaining rebels. I’d stymied that, but the village was still in danger. If there were regular army troops moving in, if Corazon fired up his airships and went for a blanket bombardment, if he had another metahuman or even a team of them ready to go...
The Chamis were on deadly ground, here. And Sun Tzu’s advice on that matter remained the best option.
“On deadly ground, fight.” I quoted. And with a thrum of the engines, I took to the sky. The anger burned within me, hotter than the heart of the reactor the suit bore on its upper back. No power cell for this, the heaviest suit I’d ever made. No, this juggernaut bore a microscopic star upon its back.
I arced out of the smoke, taking the throttle slow to get my bearings. This was the suit's first actual flight, and the jets fired, correcting the gravitic thrusters as I hurtled through the air.
Only a scant few miles separated me from the city. There was no way they’d miss me taking to the air once I got out of the cloud; Particularly since I’d sent up a giant golden beacon a minute ago.
They didn’t. Rockets arced out to meet me, just as planned. But I was well away from the Chamis village, and my friends were not at risk from collateral at this distance.
The smoking contrails arced up and rose to meet me, and I grinned wide as I kicked open the throttle.
“SHOWTIME!” I roared for none to hear, and burned hot toward Mariposa City.
Rockets are a wonderfully simple invention. An explosive payload with a burning propellant strapped to the back. Fire and forget, really, just wing them at your target and let them go.
But the problem with rockets is that they lack accuracy beyond short range. Especially against human-sized targets that are moving at high speeds. Like, oh, yours truly right now.
Rockets screamed past me. I ignored them as I kept my arms in tight to my body. Had to keep streamlined, this model didn’t have the agility of my general purpose suit. It was heavier, bulkier, in a sense almost less sophisticated. It lacked the layers of circuitry that previous iterations prioritized, relying instead upon hydraulics, mechanical actuators, and raw power to drive the whole mess. That let me devote more weight to armor...
...which I was grateful for, when one of the errant rockets actually smacked into my side.
CRUMP! I spun, recovered, and eyed the damage readouts as I kept on my way. Minor scarring to my shoulderpad, minimal damage to the helmet.
Inside the suit, I’d barely felt it as a light shove.
This was my Brute Suit, and it was built to laugh at things like this.
Then I was inside the defensive screen, staring down at the rocket batteries, and I snarled, jerked to a halt in midair.
I raised my hands, and spun up the gravitic shear capacitors. A slow-moving purple bar started a crawl from zero to one hundred, and I cursed at its slowness. At least they’d given me an unexpected blessing in that most of the truck-mounted rocket batteries were parked parallel to each other. They’d lined them up.
Small arms fire sheeted off me as the soldiers on the ground woke up to the hostile presence in their midst— and there was no doubt that I was hostile.
I looked like a proper monster, after all.
Ten feet tall from my feet to the upper top of my helmet, the Brute Suit was a dull grey with black ultra-carbonfibre padding at the joints. Spikes coated two truly massive shoulderpads that stretched a third of the way down my upper arm, almost covering the elbows. The whole thing was scaled to resemble a squat and bulky humanoid form; almost too bulky to be believable. I’d gone way overweight, and had to install gravitic nodes in the main components to defray the load down to half a ton. My mask perched on top of a rounded, neckless helmet, white and resembling nothing so much as an ancient muse, with an inscrutable smile upon her lips.
A red cloak billowed and swirled in the wind, rising to a cowl and fixed around my torso with a plain white broach. It was holographic. Any cape sturdy enough to survive the abuse this suit was built to take could be used against me. But it was one of my signatures, so I couldn’t just go without it.
The bullets did nothing, even when they opened up with jeep-mounted heavy machine guns. Most of their arsenal was the finest cutting edge weaponry that nineteen eighty had to offer. A few of them brought rocket launchers to bear, and I ignored those as well. The ones that hit chipped the outer armor, blew holes in a layer, maybe two. But between the ceramicoat alloy, high-grade steel, impact gel, and carbonfibre, I wasn’t in any real danger.
Still, they weren’t slowing, weren’t properly afraid yet. It seemed wrong to me, that they weren’t screaming. The rough beast in my heart that burned at their careless slaughter, the thing in me that howled for justice, wanted to see them fearful before they died.
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