I sink into one of the leather seats of Blackwolf’s custom-built airship, tangible proof that I’m not a small-timer anymore. Below us, I can already see that Doctor Impossible’s base has rusted.
Coming in from the air, we see the remains of a shattered grandeur, skeletal arcs of decaying metal soaring into the sky, gesturing at what used to be. In its prime, the base held unsurpassed marvels; now, metal and concrete lie rotting in the sun.
The north beach is dotted with a row of immense concrete pylons, streaked with rust from their internal reinforcements, foundations for a high-energy physics laboratory that went unbuilt. A railway, overgrown now, leads inward to the main facility, a jewel set into cliff and jungle by robot labor. A central dome bulks up out of the trees, only the spines of its four structural girders intact. The curve of the dome itself is still defined by a rotting latticework, but half the panes have fallen in, to shatter on the gleaming laboratory floor below. Moss and vines drip from the holes.
Water has seeped into everything. When CoreFire cannoned through the outer bulkhead, the whole structure shifted off its axis, windows shattered, the sterile shell cracked, and seals popped. The floors of clean workrooms are smeared with windblown dirt and animal tracks, lost to contamination. Thick tree roots have broken through the tile. Iron railings have begun to rust, and stone stairways have cracked and fallen away.
Under the laboratory dome, an enormous spherical mechanism lies frozen in decay. A stray beam of heat vision made a tiny hole to let the moisture in, and the delicate mechanisms, so smooth and finely balanced that a child could turn them with one hand, rusted into a solid mass. And Phathom-5, a supercomputer built to plot the arcs of shattering atoms, is silent; tropical rains now fall into the sterile core, where the tiniest particles of dust were once forbidden. The plasma rifles mounted along the eastern wall are silent, and the particle accelerator is still, pointed upward at a seventy-degree angle, garishly painted and crested with radiator fins. A family of osprey nests in the barrel.
“And they actually called him mad,” Damsel mutters next to me.
Lily kicks at a shell casing. Blackwolf shushes them.
Damsel points. “That’s where they breached the inner fortress. You were unconscious by then.”
“I was shamming,” mutters Blackwolf. “I can do that, you know.”
Doctor Impossible built this fortress in the late 1970s, at the beginning of his career, that golden time when every six months he was back again, looming giant on the world’s view screen. No one knew what to expect—peril from the sky, or an armored robot rising out of Hudson Bay, or a mind-exchanging ray—a stranger among us aping familiarity, peering at the others with hyperintelligent eyes. He’d even gone to the stars, tamed an alien god. No field of endeavor seemed closed to his manifold, questing intellect.
Out there in international waters, he worked day and night. His gleaming citadel would have been visible from space if the light hadn’t been bent around it. He’d fought Stormcloud to a standstill, thrown back the Super Squadron, outwitted Doctor Mind on his home ground. His battles with CoreFire dominated the news. And there were rumors of a device, a machine he had conceived and would one day build, that could make him utterly invincible.
Then three superheroes banded together as friends and teammates, and the world had a reigning super-team again. Doctor Impossible had a real opponent, and they foiled his schemes again and again. The last time, they’d brought the fight to him.
A couple of areas are still sealed off. Doctor Impossible dug deep—there are eight or nine levels below ground, living quarters and specialized laboratories. And the scans show shafts running deeper, down below the level of the ocean floor. One of them, we’ve tagged as a geothermal pipe; the others are anybody’s guess. Blackwolf spends a little time looking at them, then shakes his head.
The titanic remains of a late-generation Antitron sprawl across the courtyard and over one wall, an enormous blaster cannon still clutched in its hand. It had fought a desperate fight, but stripped of malign animation, it displays a primitive beauty, a face like an Inca mask. Its chest dimples inward where Damsel’s final punch landed.
The eight of us stand there in the shadow of the doomsday device, lying on its side now, partially buried in the sandy ground. What had it been like that day? What was he thinking? The helmet, the cape, the army of mutants. He must have known he was going to lose. He was supposed to be smart, though. He was supposed to have been a scientist.
I shuffle vision modes through infrared, ultraviolet, and a weird sonic ping that makes me nauseous. I can do a kind of ultrasound bounce, a limited X-ray vision. Everybody shows up different on that one. Blackwolf’s a baseline normal, an ordinary man; a few bits of metal have lodged in him over the years, and one of his knees got rebuilt. Feral’s all organic, flesh and bone, both much denser than normal—and of course he’s not human; his skeleton’s a morph between human and a Bengal tiger. Damsel shows up all black—the sonics bounce off her skin, just like everything else. Rainbow’s insides are crammed with augmentations, cables, floating extra organs. Her technology’s a different flavor from mine, more biomimetic, H. R. Giger’s dream of a schoolgirl.
We’re not sure exactly what the device was. A series of metal-plated globes, one inside the other, multiple shells now broken open and exposed to the air. Sand lies in the mechanism, fatally spoiling its polished smoothness. I remember Doctor Impossible on TV, swearing it would destroy the Earth if he turned it on. Mister Mystic puts one hand to its side and shivers. He says Doctor Impossible’s work is too complicated for him to read, that he has a hypercompressed style. But he thinks it probably would have worked.
I’ve been over and over the footage recorded of the last time anyone saw him, a fragment of news video taken after a skirmish with Embryarch. His face glows vivid in close-up, barred with scan lines. He’s walking, talking to someone off-camera, right before it cuts out. A name.
Mystic stands in the center of the chamber, arms out, fingers spread. He’s reading energy traces out of the surrounding air. If CoreFire came here, he’ll have left a unique signature. Mister Mystic has unusually long fingers.
“CoreFire did come here, but only for a minute. He landed there, and stood for a while. I think he was using his zeta sense. Then he went inside for a few minutes. He didn’t touch anything.”
“So what?” Rainbow looks bored, twitchy. She’s used to fighting in front of a camera.
“We don’t know yet.” Blackwolf’s thinking something, but he’s not saying what.
It’s getting cold in the shadows. Elphin perches on the outer wall, watching the sun set over a tropical sea like glass, gilding everything and casting long shadows from the towers and the beams poking up out of the ruined portions. The enormous hulk is absolutely silent, absolutely still.
The service door is armored; two feet thick, it’s set into the rock away from the main installation. People always think cyborgs can open things, as if carrying a chip in your head made you a magic lock pick. But I see a look go between Rainbow and Feral that plainly says, Amateur hour! so I kneel, tear off a panel, and give it my best. Any 57 percent–replacement cyborg knows a little about military electronics. I hack away for about fifteen minutes, armor heating up in the hot sun, before I hear the hum and click of bolts sliding back. Feral and I haul it open together, his thick, hairy arm reaching over me to pull with demonic strength as I strain awkwardly from a crouch, his breath on the back of my neck. He’s as strong as I am, at the very least.
The group spills inside, down a service ladder clinging to one wall of an underground chamber, a rock-walled factory space. Elphin skims down and in, spear shaft held high, feet well off the ground—she won’t touch cold iron. God, she even trails her legs behind her like Tinker Bell. Blackwolf slides down with his feet on the outside. Feral stalks in afterward, climbing head down like a squirrel descending a tree. Damsel waits a moment in the sunlight, the last to come inside.
For fo
urteen years, this was his stronghold, an open challenge to the world. The inside is cavernous, a metal catwalk crossing a deep crevasse, rock walls rising to meet overhead. Light spills in through what might be gun ports, unmanned now. Doctor Impossible built machines to attack the world, machines to make cities cower, and he built to scale. Infrared shows bats nesting above.
“Power’s on,” I remark, pointlessly. A few shafts of light scar the dimness. Beneath us, electricity once flashed and sparked between towers of metal, now lifeless. Damsel and Blackwolf are talking, barely looking around.
“No, you’re missing the point. Just because I can’t fly doesn’t make it—”
“Jesus, give it a rest, Marc.”
But the door at the far end of the bridge shoots open. Blackwolf spots it first, but waits for Damsel.
“Uh…darling?”
“What?”
“Contact.”
I’ve never worked with real professionals before, and the response is impressive. Damsel shouts, “Fliers! Get in the air!” And everyone scatters, Elphin buzzing sideways off the bridge. The robots bear the imprint of Impossible’s style, metal spiders moving with aggressive intelligence. One of them has lost a leg in the earlier battle. Feral bounds forward, ducking and rolling under the chattering guns. I’ve seen video of Feral working, but video is nothing. It doesn’t tell you what it’s like to be close to someone that big who can move that quickly.
I kick into a power sprint to catch up, legs extending an extra foot of metal skeleton, cantilevering out from inside my calves. Blackwolf dodges an initial burst of fire with ridiculous ease, turning an insolently casual cartwheel before vaulting atop the lead robot and yanking at its sensory cluster.
Elphin is already beside one of them, her lance lodged in its side, with a cry of “Titania!” As I plow into Blackwolf’s ride, she levers hers off the bridge and into space, while Feral tears at the other’s wiring. I’m too pissed off for subtlety, and by the time Damsel and Lily catch up, I’ve broken this one’s back.
“Nice one.” Blackwolf gives my arm a playful slap that clunks dully on armor, but inside it I feel it for a long time after that. Mister Mystic materializes from somewhere with a shrug.
The inner door goes quicker than the first. Damsel scouts ahead. I hear a blast, and she comes skidding backward unhurt along the polished metal floor, the front of her costume shredded. I look the other way as she twists it around to cover herself—I don’t need that kind of trouble.
Blackwolf stops to help her up, but she snaps at him.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” I’d swear that behind that mask, he looks hurt. I must be imagining things.
We come out into the entrance hall, built on a titanic scale, the upper reaches lost in arched and buttressed dimness, letting in the sunlight where the ceiling has rusted out. Even Feral seems subdued by its cathedral hush. Elphin lets herself drift upward in the warm air as we spread out across its football-field width, half-waiting for a counterassault that launched two years ago. The air is damp, and a few tufts of grass have managed to take hold in the places where the mud collects.
A thin stream trickles where one of the ceiling seams split, puddling on the floor before draining off to some lower level. Galleries to the left and right afford glimpses of laboratories and audience chambers where the battle raged, leaving blast marks and the shells of shattered robots. A few intact display cases hold some of the Doctor’s trophies—a helmet, a pistol, and an odd-looking piece of ancient bone. At the far end, a pair of immense doors hang on their hinges. The throne room lies beyond, where they arrested him.
The upper rooms are still open to the sky in places. The rain has washed dirt and leaves in, and seabirds build their nests in cracks in the monumental statuary. We walk slowly in the metal-walled rooms, listening to our footsteps, unwilling to speak. The walls feature displays of dead television screens and banks of LEDs, red and orange and green, now dull, gemlike nubs.
Mystic concentrates on reading old thoughts, but it’s been a long time since Doctor Impossible was here. The rest of us idle around, poking through living quarters and office space. The Doctor used chipboard desks and Aeron chairs, just like a high-tech start-up.
Blackwolf puts a hand on my shoulder for balance while he adjusts his tights. Damsel doesn’t appear to notice.
One wing still runs on its own generator. From overhead, I hear Blackwolf saying, “See the control room? I remember from when we switched brains that time,” and I follow.
Here the rooms are still bright and clean, humming with life. The control room where we end up looks down on the great domed laboratory. Catwalks crosshatch the upper reaches. The dome’s retractable roof has jammed open a little, giving us a sliver of fading sunlight.
I lean over the rail to watch Lily squinting at something on the laboratory floor. “C’mon up,” I call. “Looks like we’re in here.”
Going in I squeeze past Feral standing guard, his loud breathing and his animal warmth.
Blackwolf taps away at a computer but doesn’t seem terribly interested in what he’s doing. An animated hologram globe shows the Earth morphing from the primordial supercontinent Pangaea through the present day into a future version, a single landmass labeled Pangaea Ultima, ice ages coming and going in between. Colored graphs show temperature and CO2 levels shifting too fast to follow.
“Now what?” I look over at Damsel.
“Keep looking. He can’t hide forever.”
In the field, everyone defers to Damsel and Blackwolf, our nominal co-leaders who don’t seem to want to look at each other.
Finally, Blackwolf speaks up. “We’ve got other options. Someone’s still got to track down those iridium isotopes.”
“I thought you and Damsel got rid of that stuff ten years ago.” Feral’s back again, apparently satisfied there are no evildoers nearby.
“That was ten years ago; I’ve thought of a whole new set of possibilities since then. I’m including matter transmutation, and a couple of unidentified ETs. There are magical options.” Blackwolf ticks them off on his fingers.
“God, I didn’t think of that. CoreFire hated magic.” Damsel is looking down at the laboratory floor. She seems to be remembering something, or trying to. I watch Damsel and that famous force field shimmering, and involuntarily I wonder if I could take her if it came to it. Blackwolf glances over, and I feel uncomfortably as if he’s read my mind.
“Fucking Impossible.” Damsel slumps into one of the high-tech chairs and spins around, looking at the ceiling, her force field flickering blue.
“What happens now? What can we expect?” I ask.
Lily looks at me and speaks the answer everyone is already thinking: “Doomsday.”
No one talks on the way back up, even when I waste a clip on a laughing hologram of the Doctor, a rookie mistake. I blush furiously, but Blackwolf winks at me.
Back in Blackwolf’s high-tech airship, acceleration pushes me back into my seat, and the island recedes behind us, but I can’t stop thinking about it. I used to have a real life; I used to be someone who went on vacation to Brazil. I used to be able to walk down a street without getting stared at, and lie on a bed, and talk to a man who would look at me in something approaching a normal way.
Mentiac predicts that in the very far future, the stars will have cycled through all possible stages of their fusion reactions, from hydrogen to helium and so on down the periodic table to iron. And then there will be a true iron age, when every atom in the universe will have turned to iron, everything transmuted by inexorable centuries to basest metal, even high-tech alloys, even diamonds. Everything. In my imagination, iron stars orbited by iron planets float through an iron galaxy in an iron void. But even then it won’t be over. There’s always a Rust Age.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
INVINCIBLE
Dressed in gray coveralls and a sanitary mask, I mop the marble floor of the Champions’ lobby and dust the statue of Galatea until I’m satisfied my machines h
ave disabled the cameras. Then I retire to a supply closet and change, stepping out under the domed skylight in full mask and cape. Time for stage two of the doomsday plan, a three-stage plan not counting the actual doomsday.
It’s an illicit thrill to walk through the front door in costume. Just another chapter to the legend, and everything is falling into place, almost too easily this time. No sign of CoreFire, and the Champs are off on another useless reconnaissance mission. They’ll be gone for hours, and meanwhile the next piece of my device will soon be safely in my possession. Thanks to me, Dollface is finally going to have her day in the sun.
The new Power Staff is complete and for the hundredth time, I test it out for grip and heft. Most of the parts came out of a local RadioShack, but the design…only I know how to do that. Molecular circuitry, holograms, pocket MRI…I had a lot of time in prison. The power jewel glows a deep red, and I pad silently and invisibly through the corridors, no more than a drift of static on the monitors. I have the floor plans from the place memorized, details culled and inferred from blueprints, satellite photos, fan magazines, even that interminable documentary.
I have to admit it’s magnificent. Spinning in place, I gawk like a tourist at the profoundly vulgar piece of architecture. Guy Campbell, the Silver Sentinel, more or less bought his way onto the team by refitting this place as the team headquarters after gutting the telecom giant that built it. He lasted about six weeks, and I think he was just too embarrassed to ask for it back.
Splendid, but the place smells like they always do—sweat and ozone and disinfectant, hospital smells. The ability to stretch your limbs or secrete acids can wreak havoc on the human metabolism. There’s a fine line between a superpower and a chronic medical condition.
The heroes left an hour ago, and there’s time for a little sightseeing. The entrance lobby is a museum of superherodom, souvenirs from brighter days.
The wedding of Damsel and Blackwolf was the brightest moment of 1980s superherodom, a union of the two founding members of the greatest super-team in the world, at the height of its powers. The added fact that Damsel was Stormcloud’s daughter made it a matter of superhero royalty. They were our Charles and Diana. When Stormcloud placed the Nightstar Sapphire around Damsel’s neck, it was effectively a coronation for the Champions, a passing of the torch. Both Peterson graduates, actually—to think I knew them when. Not that they’d remember me.
Soon I Will Be Invincible Page 14