It’s not as bad as it looks. I’m wearing part of my costume under my clothes, and I’ve got my emergency kit. I open the briefcase, take out the Power Staff, and begin to piece it together. Zeta-powered of course—twenty-five years old, and still the best power source you can carry in one hand.
I peer outside. At least this isn’t the whole team, just a few of the core members. And they aren’t really a team at all anymore, although I haven’t been following the soap-opera details. They fan out on the sidewalk in an arc, just like in their old publicity photos.
Blackwolf, “the Ultimate Crime Fighter,” twirling one of his throwing knives. Damsel, “First Lady of Power,” hovering three feet off the pavement. She’ll be trouble. Feral, “Savage Streetfighter,” barely keeping formation. Elphin, “Warrior Princess,” imperturbable as ever, hefting her silly spear. Where did they get her, again? Rainbow Triumph, “Teen Idol with an Attitude.” Christ.
But there’s something a little off about it. They haven’t been a team for quite a while, and to my professional eye they look…ragged. Damsel and Blackwolf used to fight next to each other, but they’ve put Feral between them in the formation. Feral seems even more manic than usual.
Beatable? Maybe.
Damsel borrows a megaphone from one of the cops. “Doctor Impossible! Is that you?”
“Who dares!?”
“You know us, Doctor Impossible. We’re the Champions.” Rainbow says something to her. “The New Champions.”
“Fine. It’s me.”
“You’re an escaped felon. We’re giving you a chance to surrender quietly. This doesn’t have to be a fight.”
This sort of offer is a mere formality for a man with a Power Staffand a napkin taped to his face, and she knows it. I’m sweating, wishing I had my helmet. I promised myself once that I wouldn’t go down in street clothes.
“You didn’t think prison would stop me, did you? I’m back, and I’m going to take over the world.”
“It’s five against one, Doctor Impossible. Same odds as last time. Final offer.”
I could bring up CoreFire, but I won’t. They’re shorthanded and they know it. I’ll get out of this, and I’m destined to rule this world.
“Come on in.”
A brief pause ensues, a twitchy moment, like the beginning of a gunfight. It’s always chancy, facing down one of these people. No matter who it is, you’re going to be dealing with the end product of a long, improbable story, of a person so strange and powerful that he or she broke the rules of what is ordinarily possible. Whoever you’re facing is guaranteed to be special—an Olympic wrestler, a radioactive freak, the fated son of somebody. They’re winners. Taking a red arrow or a sea horse or the letter G as their symbol, they sally forth to make your life difficult.
Rainbow Triumph steps forward. One of my most popular enemies, posing in all her teen-idol glory.
“I know what you’re going to say,” I begin.
“You’re under arrest.” She says it like a bossy eighth grader, like “You’re in my seat.”
Blackwolf mutters, “By the numbers, people.” He’s got that twitchy autistic look he gets in a fight, his odd neurology hyperaccelerating, problem solving in real time.
But they’ve forgotten how fast I am. My wrist flickers, one of my sonic grenades. The heroes scatter. Damsel leaps to shield her ex-husband, but Feral is a sitting duck. It goes off with a boom, shattering windows down the block, setting off car alarms for a quarter mile. Feral flies like an oversized plush toy and I can count him out for about a minute. He’ll be angry when he gets up. Dust rolls over everything.
And then Rainbow Triumph socks me in the stomach, and I fold up like a paper bag. She’s the daughter of one of Gentech’s top executives, and they’ve been working on her for years, ever since she was seven years old and they found out she had a degenerative bone disease. An experimental treatment saved her life, but the price was that she became, over time, a permanent inmate of their research and development division. After the first round of implants went in, they kept layering in new technology, more every year. Then the marketing department got its hands on her.
They’ve been grooming her as a superhero since she was eleven, starting her on search and rescue work, then moving up to crime fighting. She looks great on the news videos, but when you stand up close to her, you can see there isn’t much human tissue left. I took a blood sample once when I was holding her hostage, just to see. It looked wrong, more orange than red, and it stank.
Say what you will about Gentech and its publicity practices, that girl can hit, and those fins on the sides of her gloves are razor-sharp. Stupidly, I’d been watching the show outside, and now a teenage girl is going to beat me senseless. She hits me again and I fall down. She doesn’t weigh much, but she has this trick of bracing herself against the ground to get leverage. So much for the world’s smartest man. I scramble around for a second under a table.
She comes on in a fighting stance, gorgeous wing chun stuff, her face set, with those scary eyes unblinking. She moves like speeded-up stop-motion animation. I’m strong, but let’s face it, I’m not the fighter she is, not toe-to-toe. It’s just not my métier. I pick up a chair and toss it at her, but she catches it, twists it out of my hand, and smashes it against the floor. I swing again, stagger her, but she pulls off an admirable spin kick to my chin. The world tumbles, and then I feel pavement against my back. I’m sliding out into the street, legs in the air. A news helicopter overhead is catching the whole thing.
Who’s next? Feral’s coming to in a furry heap of brick dust and broken glass. I wobble to my feet, staff in hand, barely in time to meet Feral’s rush, an enormous man with the head of a tiger. He’s over seven feet tall, prodigiously strong, like a pickup truck with claws. He’s never killed anyone that I know of, but he’s not particularly careful not to. He’s ended careers before, plenty of them. I’ve never had him in the lab, so I never found out if he was a hyperevolved feline, or a gene graft, or a particularly nasty piece of veterinary surgery.
I step up to Feral and swing two-handed with the staff, catching him full in the face. It feels like I’m hitting a concrete wall with a baseball bat. His counterpunch bowls me over. I fly ten feet before grinding to a stop on the asphalt. I change tactics, the Power Staff sprays sleeping gas, and Feral staggers, falls.
If you haven’t been this close to superhumans, you don’t understand what it’s like to fight them. Even when you’ve got powers yourself, the predominant impression is one of shock. The forces moving around you are out of human scale, and your nervous system doesn’t know how to deal with it. It’s like being in a car accident, over and over again. You never feel the pain until later.
Everything slows down. Lightning flickers overhead, then thunder. On one knee, I raise the staff just in time to absorb it. Damsel. The Power Staff’s now in its fully powered state, force field humming and vibrating in one hand. Someone’s in the shadows. Lily? Mister Mystic? I don’t have time to think about it. Out in the street, it’s going to be sheer murder.
Who’s next? Damsel charges out of the smoke. I tear a parking meter from the sidewalk, wield it, keeping the Power Staff in the off hand. I keep her at bay and sort of manage to jab her in the eye. She takes another pass and I swing it at her. I’m faster, but she parries it with a forearm. She grabs me one-handed—I can feel the new suit tear as we swing around and into a brick wall. I’m staggering forward like a drunk, one sleeve hanging off my jacket, and she swoops in at me, but I sidestep and manage to plant a wad of plastique on the small of her back. She’s clawing for it when it goes off, sending her backward in a long arc the length of a football field, over the shops and parked cars, to land with a distant crunch and tinkle of glass. Who’s next?
Elphin, coming down out of the storm. A laser beam shatters off her spear point; then she hefts it to jab. The spear rings off my Power Staff with a bell-like clang. I hit her with the pocket sonic disruptor and she staggers.
Glancing around, I see the storefront is in ruins. When did that happen? A boom rattles windows up and down the street. The sky above us is darkening, thunderheads looming over Manhattan. My staff unfolds like a conjurer’s trick and begins to glow. Bolts of power form a cage around me.
It’s raining. Traffic has stopped for blocks everywhere. The force field is fading, raindrops sizzling off of it. Damsel is back, and blue fire blooms around us as we grapple, fingers intertwined. I can’t keep this up much longer. Feral has a car up over his head, arms straight, the thing balanced on the midpoint, a pretty nice sedan. The thing creaks, and something in the trunk shifts, but he keeps it there long enough to brace for a throw. There’re too many of them. The light around Elphin’s spear point is getting brighter, and I back up. Even I can feel that heat.
The battle comes to a halt momentarily, like the instant of silence in a crowded bar. Elphin raises her spear as high as she can over her head. Then a blinding flash. Lightning strikes once, twice. Rain smell, steam, the summertime reek of hot asphalt. My Power Staff absorbs the charge, but the noise and shock are shattering. The sidewalk underneath me cracks, blackened.
Time to stop thinking about a clean win. There’s a submarine waiting for me in the Hudson River. If I can make it a few blocks along Eighty-third, this will all be behind me.
I glare back at my assembled foes; then my staff belches a concealing smoke. Stooping, I heave a manhole cover out of the street, then drop down into the sewers. A beam from my Power Staff welds it shut above me. That will hold them a moment. The staff’s charge is almost down to nothing.
My eyes adjust, and I can make out the ancient tile on the floor and ceiling. I’ve been down here before. It’s startlingly quiet, and you get used to the smell. You wouldn’t think it could be so quiet in Manhattan. There’s an inch or two of water in here, but mercifully it’s fairly clean. A few blocks away I’ll find daylight, and freedom.
“What happened to CoreFire?” Blackwolf’s quiet voice carries through the tunnels. Of course it’s him—I’d missed him in the fight overhead. Who else would have charted the battle ahead of time, known the sewer map, come straight here, and waited? He steps into view, cracking his knuckles theatrically.
“Jesus, Blackwolf, I didn’t do it! You’ve got the wrong guy.” I wish I hadn’t blown up his ex-wife just now.
One of his knives ricochets off the tile, right into my head. I aim the staff and try to blast him, but he saw it coming a second ago. He’s already in the air, swinging off a ceiling pipe, covering the ground between us much too fast. The kick takes me in the chest.
I know he doesn’t have any powers, but he’s scary as hell, so graceful that even now it’s hard not to stop and watch. I wonder what makes him this way, what primal, originary scene branded him with an obsession that makes him dress like an animal, and helps him fight. Who does he see when he looks at me?
I try to stand again. My legs don’t feel all that firm, but he gives me time. He’s just standing there waiting for me.
“How’d you do it?” he demands. “How did you kill him?”
He hits me twice before I can answer, or even move again. I’m supposed to be fast, but the man’s like a demon. It’s just the two of us in the sewers, no TV cameras, and he isn’t going to hold back. He’s one of the ones who enjoy this.
“Was it the iridium?” he snarls.
“I don’t know! It wasn’t me!”
I lunge for him, but it’s as if he’s seen this movie before. His hands close on my wrist and he swings me around into the wall.
“Was it a black hole? Was it magic?” He kicks me in the head again, and I flop over into the muck.
Another kick, this time in the stomach, and pocket change fountains from my trousers. He can spot any move before I do it. I need to throw him off his game, if that’s possible.
“Ask your wife.” It comes out in a gut-punched voice, but he hears me.
“What?” He freezes a moment, graceless for once. I kick the legs out from under him, then grab an ankle and twist. Desperate, I’m strong enough to lift him, spin, and smack him into the wall. I think he’s stunned.
I stagger on, splashing through garbage, hoping to God he doesn’t get up and run after me, but too tired to do anything about it if he does.
This is why I’m not ready. This is the part I always forget about until it’s too late, the flaw in the plan, the part where they hit you again and again. A less reflective man might have missed the point but, as I keep telling you, I’m a genius.
The last phase of my plan is coming, the one I haven’t figured out yet. I need to be invincible, and soon. By the time the moon comes into position.
I spot a set of rungs set in the wall, scrabble up them and out into the fresh air, gasping on my hands and knees on the sidewalk. Only two blocks left. Pedestrians stream around me, like they don’t even know I’m in a fight. Then they all look up.
My feet leave the ground, and the breath goes out of me. Damsel has me this time, clutching my lapels in her fists, dragging me up. We climb, story after story, out of the chasm of Broadway. I can feel the warmth of her breath on my forehead as we shoot up past the highest rooftops, and for a moment I hang above the city grid, bathed in the midafter-noon sun, bright as any hero ever born.
Then the shock of it wears off, and I realize my hands are free. There is a capsule on the inside of my mouth, containing a tiny sample of gas I bought from an alien visitor, the atmosphere of an ocean planet forty light-years away.
I grab her fists in mine, bite down hard, and nerve myself to kiss her on the lips. The last trick, one I’ve held in reserve for years. She’s astonished, openmouthed, and my poison breath passes into her.
She falls away, fainting, and I hover on the Power Staff’s diminishing charge. In ten minutes, she’ll have recovered, but I’ll be miles away. Lazily, lucky for once, I drift, and the breeze takes me west and down over the rooftops of Columbia students, over the trees of Riverside Park, and into the Hudson River.
I sink toward the dark water as my submarine surfaces underneath me, and I’m already charting my next destination. Next time, it won’t be so easy. I take one last look at Manhattan, sketch a bow, and descend.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
AT LAST WE MEET
Lily and I have been up for hours, combing through the debris of yesterday’s fight for clues about where Doctor Impossible came from, or what he’s going to do.
I’m up here as penance for having missed the event while running down a false lead in Monongahela, Pennsylvania. Lily managed to miss it, too—vacation day supposedly—and no one knows where Mister Mystic was. Damsel’s in a foul mood. Everyone has been, since the funeral.
It would help if the rest of the team would talk about what happened yesterday. Most of what I know, I got from newspapers. As far as I can tell, Blackwolf bumped into an out-of-uniform Doctor Impossible and called the alert. Ritual banter followed, after which Doctor Impossible proceeded to thrash the lot of them on national television and escape via means unknown. Blackwolf got bested in single combat, and Damsel, our resident powerhouse, went down on some vulnerability that’s not even listed in the central computer. Feral’s going to be in the hospital for weeks. They’re killing us in the press.
With the rest of the team licking their wounds back at HQ, Lily and I do a slow walk-through of the rubble. Neither of us has done this before.
I try to start us off. “They sure managed to break a lot of windows.”
“That’s what I got, too.”
“I feel stupid for hanging around here. We should go to the zoo or something.” Yesterday’s freak storm has passed and I’m starting to overheat.
The whole block is cordoned off with yellow police tape, and the police are watching me closely as I walk around in the middle of the street. They must be wondering why the Champions wrecked this block, let Doctor Impossible slip away, then sent a notorious villain and somebody they’ve never heard of to figure out what ha
ppened.
I cycle viewing modes in the hopes something exciting will come up to justify holding back the cleanup crews this long.
I give it another try. “So. Blackwolf bumps into Doctor Impossible. Calls the Champs…”
“Except the ones who are out of town, and it’s totally not their fault,” Lily adds.
“Where were you?”
“Robbing a bank, thanks.”
“So…” For all I know, this is a test, and Blackwolf’s watching us from somewhere. In the coffee shop, Rainbow Triumph’s pointed girl-size shoe prints square off against the marks of the supercriminal’s loafers.
“He leaves the Starbucks…” Lily prompts. Residual trace of some zeta energy leading out the front window.
“What’s he doing in a coffee shop?”
“Genius is mysterious.”
“And there’s a…fight.” I gesture uncertainly.
Outside, the pavement has buckled and heaved under blows of incalculable force. The energy traces here are more distinct: Damsel’s slashing track through the air; yellow-green where Elphin managed one of her weather tricks; Doctor Impossible’s staff leaving a riot of colors and shapes.
“A big fight. Five against one.” Lily can’t see the energy traces, but it’s pretty obvious what was going on. The Champions’ collective energies focused on one man who wouldn’t go down.
“And I guess he got away here.”
The Doctor’s energy track leads to a manhole cover. Classic—no wonder they’re so upset. Lily lifts it up one-handed.
“Ech. Mister Mystic skipped the fight, too. Why doesn’t he go down there?”
“I’ll go. I can do some spectroscopy on the fight scene.”
“Show-off.”
Street noise cuts off abruptly when I lower myself in. The city’s been through here already to check for structural damage, so the scene is probably worthless, but it’s a relief to be offstage for a minute.
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