Also... the camp had taken me in, and asked very few questions. Their supplies had been raided because I'd stood up to the Black Bloods. Our negotiation had failed because the Black Bloods had a use for me. While I was in no way taking responsibility for the actions of those sick little gangers, the truth of the matter was that my presence had unintentionally exacerbated the situation.
I felt responsibility toward these people, toward Roy and Sparky and the rest of the crew if nothing else. While I didn't know everyone in the camp, with one or two exceptions they seemed like decent enough people. And I had no doubts that the Bloods would mow them down to the last child if they could.
I shut off the water, exited the stall. I looked toward my stained and dirty clothes and paused. A dark shape hung next to them, unfamiliar and fluffy. Upon investigation it turned out to be a ratty, hideous fur coat, with some sweat pants folded under it. I glanced around, and found Minna in a far stall. She was taking a scrubbing rag to the inside of the armor, letting the water sluice filth away.
“Minna, is this yours?”
I held up the clothes. She shook her head, and pointed at me. “You keep. Until we wash your clothes.”
I stood there for a second, naked and dripping. Then I nodded. “Thank you.” She merely grunted, and got back to work. I dried off using the cleaner parts of my dirty clothing, and folded the coat around me, before easing my legs into the pants. Dear heavens they felt good...
She helped me carry the armor off to the laundry shack, afterwards. By then a gentle snow was falling, and I shivered until I got into the scrap-metal room, and turned on a space heater. Joan was waiting with a thermos of coffee, bless her soul, and I downed it as I pulled out my toolkit and got to work. Minutes folded into hours, and I worked on the armor. The core was a cascading wave generator, a surprisingly good one at that. The rest of the armor must have been kitbashed from whatever he had lying around, but this part had to have come from something fairly expensive.
If I'd had time, I would have peeled it apart piece by piece, taking notes every step of the way and conducting some thoroughly enjoyable research. I'd found an unexpected joy in utilizing my skills and talents to crack it open and study this rag-tag suit of armor. But necessity was driving this bus, and I had to see it through. So instead of researching, I repurposed. Instead of studying, I repaired. At one point I wandered outside and cracked the hood of the SUV, started taking parts from there to replace the bits of the suit I couldn't fix. Two or three trips back and forth, and I thought I had all I needed. During the last one, Martin caught my eye, followed me into the shack as I went. “Shit. You still up?”
“Hm?” I blinked. “What do you mean?”
“It's like five in the morning. Most of us got some sleep.”
I blinked. Time had flown. I picked up the thermos of coffee, and gave it a shake. Empty. Well, that explained the ache from the direction of my bladder. “Give her a second,” I said, and visited the port-a-john. On my way back I noticed my red hoodie hanging from a makeshift clothesline, cleaned of blood beyond a few dubious stains, and rimed with a faint layer of frost. It was about the right size... I snagged it and headed back into the shack. Martin was examining the repair job I'd done on the armor. I joined him, smiling.
“God damn.” He shook his head, looking impressed. I'd replaced most of the bullet-dented and scored armor plating with metal from the SUV. I'd slimmed it down at the same time, which necessitated cutting down the hydraulics. The helmet had been mostly a wash... I'd kept the back of it, but the faceplate was quite thoroughly wrecked, had been before I'd detonated the phone inside of it. So I'd replaced it with my mask, welding it into the shell of the helmet, and using wires from the SUV to provide an unhackable manual linkage to the armor's subsystems. It wasn't a perfect join, and the back of the helmet had holes in it. But I'd just found a temporary solution to that.
I moved around behind the armor, and settled the red hood of my recently-retrieved-garment over the helmet. It stretched but fit, and a couple of rivets secured it for the time being. I tied the arms around the neck of the suit, and let the rest hang loose, somewhat like a cape or a mantle. Not exactly elegant, but the rest of the armor looked like a pile of repurposed junk, anyway, so I wasn't too upset with the end result.
I'd integrated the force field generator and universal remote, tying their power to the armor's core. Not a problem for the remote, but I'd have to watch the generator. While that had fixed the problem of its limited charge, excessive amounts of damage within a short time would have a chance of causing feedback within the core's wave particle processes. Mind you, if it was blocking that much damage all at once I'd have other things to worry about.
I'd also tucked the ball drone into a storage compartment in the armor's back. It'd make for faster deployment. I left space for a couple of others. I didn't have the materials to make more right now, but that might change.
But the thing I was proudest of wasn't obvious to the eye. I shed my coat, feeling air hit my bare skin. And as Martin stepped away, shaking his head, I unsealed the armor and climbed in.
“Hey! Warn a brother, all right?” He turned away from my partial nudity, but I didn't particularly care.
“Sorry,” I apologized. “Got no time—” The armor sealed over me with a hiss, the mask sliding down over my face. “—FOR MODESTY. GET READY TO STAND CLEAR.”
He backed up, as I ran the basic control systems through their checks. The newly-programmed heads-up-display of my mask flared with green letters, informing me that systems were synching at twenty... forty... sixty... seventy-four percent. I frowned and tried rerouting a few subroutines, but it held fast at seventy-four percent efficiency. Well, no matter, I could work on perfecting it later.
I lifted my arms, and the armor moved with me. There was a slight lag, but with practice I wouldn't notice it. Or if I refined the interface, got better components and raised the synchronization rate, that should fix it. But for now, I could probably work with it. I flexed the fingers of the gauntlets, and they flexed with me. I took my first step—
And promptly fell over.
Hrm.
Martin tried to help me up, started swearing. “Jesus H. Christ. Armor's like half the size it was on Scrapper, how the hell is it as heavy?”
“TWO-THIRDS OF THE SIZE, ACTUALLY. AND THE MOST VITAL COMPONENTS DIDN'T CHANGE.” I pushed myself up, leaned on Martin, then tried another step. This one went without too much trouble, and the second and third ones after it were manageable. “ALL RIGHT. GOING TO NEED TO GO OUTSIDE FOR THE NEXT TEST.”
“Probably a good idea, you gonna bust the floor if you fall again.”
I walked outside, in the dim light of pre-dawn, and looked around. No one was out yet. Good. Fewer witnesses if this failed. I didn't want to get people's hopes up and then fail to deliver. I moved down the beach, to a clear spot. Martin started to follow, but I waved him back. Didn't quite know how much pressure the grav units would exert, and I didn't want him injured.
Finally, I was ready. This had been the hardest part of the project... The rest had been repair work, with a side order of consolidating my devices into the larger structure of the armor. But the part that had taken the most work was the most crucial, and it had involved building and integrating something entirely new. In theory, it should work, but if it didn't... No, it would work. It had to. Banishing the last of my doubts, I muted the voice modulator on my mask, and breathed the words I'd programmed to activate flight mode.
“Icarus ascends.”
Turbines in my sides snapped out. They were stabilizers, really, while the gravitic oscillators in the legs did the important work, venting red light on the ground below. Tiny rotors whirred to life...
...And I rose. Just a few feet off the ground, but I flew. I flew!
As I did, I wobbled, and I fought with the armor, kept myself stable with great effort. If I toppled now, I'd plow through the beach, cause a huge mess, and inflict enough damage to the suit to
necessitate serious repairs. And maybe damage myself, too. Failure was not an option here! Fortunately, I'd accounted for this. And as I held it stable, the crude gyroscopes I'd built into the suit finished synching up. After a minute, I could relax enough to put my arms down. After another minute, I let the suit take over fully. I sat there a bit longer, then grinned. I was flying! Well, hovering.
It was time to go all out, I decided, and switched control over to the rudimentary system I'd rigged through my heads-up-display. If this worked properly, I could control my flight through leg and head motions, leaving my arms mostly free. As I did so, I noticed people starting to emerge from the tents, drawn by the whining noise of the turbines. They stared at me, and though they couldn't see my face, I grinned back under my mask.
“You ain't seen nothing yet,” I whispered, too low to trigger my mask's amplification. And with a whirl of snow and sand as the turbines went to maximum thrust, I pushed into the sky, arms thrust out like a smackbrawl wrestler performing a double clothesline.
After a minute of practicing, I had the basics down. It was with great regret that I steered back toward the ground, and came in for a landing. Flying was fun, dammit! But I had more pressing priorities.
Also, the night was starting to catch up with me, now that I'd run out of coffee. Between the adrenaline crash, the lack of sleep, and recovering from whatever the hell that smoke in Sangre's room had been, I was starting to lose steam. I needed to get this done while I was still mostly coherent.
I descended to the beach with a whir of sand and snow. Light flurries were falling again, but not enough to hinder me in any capacity.
“ALL RIGHT. MARTIN, DO HER A FAVOR?”
“Uh. Yeah, sure. What you need?”
“GET THE OTHERS TO HELP YOU AND BRING ROY OUT HERE, COT AND ALL. TIE HIM TO IT IF YOU CAN. WE HAVE SOME ROPE AROUND HERE, RIGHT?”
“The hell you planning?”
“SARA'S MERCY, THAT'S THE NAME OF THE HOSPITAL, YES? DIRE CAN PROBABLY GET HIM THERE IN TWENTY MINUTES IF SHE TAKES IT SLOW.”
He blinked, then nodded, and took off toward the sickbay at a run. I waited, ignoring the heat as best I could. The gravitic system pulled a lot of power from the core... I had basic thermal vents in here, but I hadn't expected this level of output. Thankfully the wintry conditions were helping, otherwise heat would be a real issue. I'd have to address that when I got some time. Armor does you little good if it roasts you alive while you use it.
I amused myself by testing out the mask's various sensor functions, zooming in and tracking people's faces. They were looking at me with various mixes of disbelief and fear, which was a little offputting. I'd spent the night putting this together to help them, to help us, after all. I was the same person I'd been before I'd climbed into the suit. Why fear this?
The answer came to me as soon as I asked the question. I looked scary, and the mask prevented them from taking visual cues from my face. I'd rebuilt the armor into a fairly solid-black color scheme, due to recycling the SUV's panels. The white mask stood out on it, smiling with hollow, bare eyesockets. The red hoodie on my back suggested an ominous splash, reminiscent of blood, and it didn't help that I'd added a few stabilizers on the limbs and back that looked like spikes. To someone who didn't know better, I'd look scary as hell. Unintentionally, I'd played to Martin's idea of kayfabe, and built a proper heel's outfit.
At first I was dismayed. Then the thought occurred to me, well, what of it? I'd rebuilt this armor to save a life, and appearance didn't matter for that. I'd also be using it to fight against the Black Bloods, who were worse than I could ever be. If it made my allies afraid, what would it do to my enemies? No, the armor was fine the way it was.
It took a few minutes, but they brought Roy out. They'd bundled him in sheets, practically mummified the poor guy. Ropes held the sheets in place, and I picked him up with as much care as I could muster. I gripped the legs of the cot, and hefted him in front of me. Awkward but doable, especially if I took it low and slow.
Sparky and Joan watched me solemnly, her hand on his shoulder, squeezing. Sparky just shook his head as he looked me up and down. “No offense,” he wheezed, “but you look like the sorta gal I'd normally be trying to zap.”
“IS IT TUESDAY ALREADY, SPARKY?” The crowd flinched at the sound of my voice, and Roy moaned, but Sparky just chuckled.
He sobered up pretty quick, as he reached out to pat my arm. “You take care of him, okay? He's...”
All you had left? I finished in my mind, as his voice trailed off. He was, wasn't he? Great Clown Pagliacci had taken everyone else from him.
“SHE'LL LOOK AFTER HIM. NOW STAND CLEAR, PLEASE.”
They backed up, and I took Roy up slow. The turbines hummed up to speed as we rose, rose a few feet more, and then I set off at a diagonal vector heading southwest. Toward the hospital.
CHAPTER 9: The Skies of Icon, and Kingsley's Confirmation
“Say what you will about the 'Con, but if you ever get the chance to fly through the city proper, it's a one of a kind view. But if you're a hero make sure you're registered with the MRB, or else they raise a hell of a fuss. But that's their job. They watch the watchmen, so to speak, making sure heroes aren't going rogue or endangering others needlessly. There's more to it than that, but that's a big part their main charter and it keeps them busy. And we need them doing it. That didn't sink in for me until I saw Captain Cosmopolitan pulled over for a FWI – Flying while Inebriated. Seems funny, until you learn that she flew THROUGH three buildings before they caught her. If it hadn't been night at the time, and the buildings hadn't been empty... well, it could've been bad.”
--Excerpt from “Villains Anonymous,” a short lived reality show that aired in 1999. The speaker has been identified as the Cyan Codex, a minor magical villain now in custody.
The city rose before me, steel teeth stretching into a gray sky. I had to keep it slow, perhaps twenty miles-per-hour. Going any faster would have risked catching wind shear, and Roy's cot raised my profile enough that I didn't want to risk him getting blown away. So my flight was cautious and careful, and I limited myself to about sixty feet off the ground so that I could go lower if the wind picked up. Fortunately, the flurries were coming mostly straight down from above. The overcast clouds seemed to indicate relative stability, at least for the moment.
To the far southeast a large, round, metal sphere rose from a small island offshore. It looked intriguing, but it was also too far away for easy observation. I filed it away for later research.
Passing over the dark ocean water of the inlet, I soon overflew a boardwalk full of marinas with piers full of recreational boats. It looked to have restaurants, bars, and shops crammed into every inch of available territory. Large buildings with odd architecture stood out here and there, with such names as “The Golden Galleon,” and “The Midas Mile.” The Galleon looked like an enormous, land-bound pirate ship, for no reason I could see beyond whimsy. Probably casinos, my fickle memory suggested. I didn't have much time to sightsee, but I flew a little closer to the Golden Galleon. To my surprise there were two men up on top of the roof, one watching me with binoculars and another with a rifle aimed at me. I veered away, watched as the man with the rifle aimed it down, satisfied now that his warning had been received.
Less than a mile away from this opulence and glitter, sat the hollow bones of the last generation. How many piers in this area would crumble and fall to pieces? How many boats would be reduced to rotting hulks, how many tourist attractions would go the way of Funland? Quite a lot of them, I expected, if the chaos of Y2K kept up. The city was literally powerless in the face of this disaster. How the hell had a single digit-flip caused this much trouble?
The Boardwalk passed behind me, and I started getting into Downtown proper. I passed hotels, and what looked to be a convention center. The buildings started rising far enough up that I had to move between them. There were airships out, and I kept my distance. One, which appeared to be a police blimp, foll
owed me for a few blocks with its lights flashing. I sped up a bit, outpacing it, and it cut the lights once it was clear that I wasn't stopping. There were more airships above, including one emblazoned with “MORGENSTERN SECURITY” that was armed with what looked to be water cannons, as well as few things I couldn't identify. If I hadn't been on a mission of mercy I would have been tempted to take a closer look, but I had no time for it or inclination to dodge whatever weaponry they might bring to bear against me.
I kept steady, I kept slow, and as I went I saw signs of life. A few buildings blazed with light, and people moved on the streets below them. Some of them pointed up at me as I flew by. At one point I passed over a subway station that looked to have been converted into shelters. Smart. Easier to keep an underground environment heated.
After I got through the maze of skyscrapers, the buildings below shifted. They got fancier, and of an older architecture. With my lack of historical knowledge I couldn't place the era, but it kept to a fairly small range of style. A lot of open balconies, steep roofs, brick houses, and gables.
The ground below rose, and I smiled to see it. This would probably be Pyre Hill, and from what I'd gathered it was one of the richer areas of the city. The houses got bigger and farther apart, and the few commercial areas I could see had their own parking garages. And as uniformed figures scurried to take up positions as I approached, I also inferred that they had their own security. I gained altitude, kept going. Past a cathedral with gargoyles on every ledge, past what looked to be a sprawling university campus, no students wandering among its stone fountains and ivy-clad parks. Past a series of shopping malls, parking lots cordoned off and patrolled by more uniformed people.
And there, beyond the malls, I spotted the two-winged structure that the Militia had told me about. That couldn't be anything besides Sara's Mercy, not with that much glass and marble. Lights in the windows indicated functioning power, and hopefully a satisfactory end to this little excursion. Good. I banked, and started descending for a landing.
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