Dreadnought

by April Daniels

  The Artificer is obviously American, but he affects a slight accent. Maybe he thinks it makes him sound sophisticated. He’s got eyes set deep in the hollows of his skull, and thick black hair pulled back high from a severe widow’s peak. He’s wearing—and I swear to God that this is true and I’m not making it up—he’s wearing a double-breasted white lab coat and thick purple gloves.

  No, really.

  That’s what he’s wearing.

  He notices me staring. “What’s the Legion’s pet doing in my humble shop, hm?”

  “Uh…” Now how the hell did he know I’m with the Legion? I look at Calamity. She shrugs.

  “Please, don’t delude yourself,” he says. “Only the Legion’s kiddie club wears throwaways.”

  “Oh.” I’m starting to get the feeling that the Legion are the only people in town who don’t realize that. “We’re, uh, we’re looking for Utopia.”

  “Dear God, why?” asks the Artificer, aghast.

  “It’s, uh, complicated,” I say.

  “Child, she killed Dreadnought. Why on Earth would you want to find someone who could do that?”

  “Well…because she killed Dreadnought.”

  Calamity nods. “Someone’s got to stop her.”

  Something changes in the Artificer. He seems older for a moment, opens his mouth like he’s going to say something.

  “You are not about to tell us that kids got no place in this,” says Calamity.

  The Artificer presses his lips together. “Fine. On your heads be it. How am I relevant to your errand of madness?”

  “She’s been stealing equipment all over Washington and Oregon for the past few months,” I say. “It looks like she’s gearing up for something big. We were hoping you could figure out what it is.”

  “We brought a list of the gear she rustled,” says Calamity, holding out a twice-folded square of paper. “Our sources say it’s going off in the next week or so. Think you can figure it out before she blows?”

  “That’s a difficult, dangerous, expensive question to ponder. I will require significant recompense for my efforts,” says the Artificer. Calamity sighs and reaches into her jacket again. Christ on a cracker, how rich is she? “No, money is not sufficient. I’ll need something else.”

  “Name it,” says Calamity in a guarded tone.

  “I’m almost out of N2 fluid. Obtain more for me, and I’ll see what I can do about solving your puzzle for you. Two canisters should be sufficient.”

  “Done.”

  The Artificer takes the paper from Calamity and unfolds it, then stares at it for a few moments. “This may take some time. Get my N2 fluid. I’ll call you when I’ve got something.”

  “Remember, we only have a week.”

  “Yes, yes.” He waves his hand dismissively and turns to head back into the chaos of his workshop. I’m sorry, I mean, his lair.

  Calamity and I take the elevator back up to the surface level. The factory’s side door shuts behind us with thudding magnetic bolts.

  “What’s N2 fluid, and where do we get it?” I ask as we scrunch across the gravel.

  “Non-Newtonian fluid,” says Calamity. “It’s a staple of a lot of hypertech. He uses it in my bullets, in fact. We’re gonna pick some up at the university.”

  “How much does it cost?”

  “Nothing,” says Calamity as she stows her hat in the cargo pod on her bike. “It ain’t for sale.”

  “So then how—wait, we’re not going to steal this, are we?”

  She looks at me like I’ve said something strange. “Of course. What do you think being a graycape means? We ain’t gonna let the law stand in the way of doing what’s right.”

  “Stealing isn’t right!”

  “If we were talking about stealing from people who can’t afford it, I’d agree. But we’re not. We’re talking about an ivory tower situated in the middle of a river of cash.”

  “Look, if this stuff is that common to hypertech, I’m sure I can get some from Doc Impossible. Just hang on for—”

  “NO!” Calamity’s shout echoes against the factory wall. “We are not going to the Legion for help!”

  She’s so forceful I take a half step back and pause to collect my wits. When I find them, a slow burn of anger comes with them. “Why the hell not? I’ve been letting you call the shots so far, but this is stupid!”

  Calamity swings her leg over the saddle of her bike. “The Legion’s not just gonna hand the stuff over.”

  “How do we know? We haven’t even asked them!”

  “They ain’t trustworthy! It don’t matter what they do and don’t give us, there’ll be some hook behind the bait and we’ll end up frying!” She slams the helmet down on her head. “We’re doing it my way.”

  I walk over and grab the center of her handlebars. “No. We’re not. Why do you hate them so much?”

  She looks at me, tries to stare me down. It’s hard to tell in the moonlight but I think her eyes are wet. There’s something else there, something harder and deeper than I can relate to. I look away first.

  But I keep my hand clamped on her handlebars.

  “They arrested my dad.” Sarah’s voice is thick and choked. “The government framed him for murder, and the Legion just went along with it. He’s doing twenty to life in a federal pen.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.” It feels like I understand all the words she’s using, just not the order in which she said them. Maybe I misheard her. “Why would the government want to frame him?”

  “My dad was a cape, called Ricochet. He worked just above street level,” says Sarah. “He found proof the CIA was smuggling drugs for the Colombian cartels and pocketing the cash to fund their black operations. He tried to go to Congress about it. The Legion arrested him a week later.”

  “No, that…they must have been tricked.”

  “They invited him to their tower and then ambushed him in an elevator.”

  “They wouldn’t do that—”

  “They did!” she shouts. “I only see my dad from the other side of a glass wall now! He missed my brother’s funeral, Danny!”

  “Then they were tricked!”

  “Or they didn’t bother to check out the evidence,” says Sarah, seething with contempt. “Or they were in on it. They can’t be trusted. We have to do this on our own, because there is nobody else. I’d love to be able to play by the rules, but the people who make the rules are crooked, so that’s not a choice we get to make right now. So are you with me, or am I riding alone now?”

  “This is…I don’t know, Sarah this is not what I thought we were doing—”

  “Then let go of my bike and get out of the way,” she growls.

  I open my mouth to say—to say what? I don’t know. Something. Something I hope will make this okay again, and put us back where we used to be. Where it feels like we’re supposed to be.

  A flash, blue on white, and sharp black shadows racing to the horizon.

  The pressure wave rips us from our feet and slams us across the gravel. I go end over end in a shower of rocks. Calamity’s bike spins and crunches into the ground inches from her skull. I reach out for her, find her hand in the dark. She squeezes back.

  The night is broken by a pyre rising from the shattered factory. The mushroom blooms red and black over dancing flames.

  A second flash. A piercing cobalt beam lances down from the sky and into the flames. New explosions blossom and thunder.

  The wind shifts and the smoke clears for a moment. A small figure floats down from the sky, wreathed in blue and silver.

  Utopia.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “Calamity?” I whisper. “Calamity, get up. Utopia is here; we have to leave.” She moans, gets one arm under herself, and begins to shove herself to her feet. “Are you okay?”

  “My bike…” she says.

  “We can fly, just hold on.”

  Calamity gets to her knees and pulls her helmet off. It’s carpeted with gouges. The eye shield
was up, so she’s got some cuts over her eyes and across the bridge of her nose. Calamity gingerly touches her face, blinks. “We ain’t running,” she says. Her voice is hard and steady.

  “Are you insane?” I hiss. Glancing over, I can’t see Utopia anymore. She’s dropped down into the fire, probably to finish off the Artificer. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

  Calamity is already on her feet, seeing what she can salvage from the twisted ruin of her motorcycle. “Why? Utopia didn’t show up here by accident; Gerald must have warned her we paid him a visit, then she got the same notion we did. Since she’s gone to all the trouble of keeping us from needing to track her down, it seems a mite bit inconsiderate to let that pass without so much as a how-do-ya-do.”

  I throw my hand out at the inferno. “She just blew up an entire factory!”

  Calamity snaps her hat by its brim to shake the dust off and sets it on her head. “I did notice that just now.”

  “We are not ready for this kind of fight.” I step over to grab her, and in a single fluid move she has somehow locked my wrist against my elbow and thrown me clear over her shoulder. I land and slide for a yard or two.

  “You get along home if you want to, but that woman just killed our last lead.” Calamity begins unloading her pistols and stowing the ammo in her pockets. “Without the Artificer we’ve got no prayer of heading off what she’s got planned. So if you want to avenge the guy who gave you that mantle, now is your one and only chance. But if you wanna quit the moment it gets hard, then I’ll not cry to see the back of you.”

  I get to my feet. “We don’t even know if we can hurt her!”

  She holds up a bullet with a very pointy tip. “Tungsten penetrators. These will kill anything.”

  A huge gout of sparks and embers leaps into the sky as something inside the fire collapses. Somewhere in there, Utopia is erasing her trail, or maybe stealing what she can use. This is an amazingly bad idea.

  “We should call for backup,” I say, but I know there’s no point. By the time they get here she’ll be long gone.

  “Ain’t no cavalry coming.” Calamity finishes loading her weapons and snaps the cylinders shut. “We do this now, or we don’t do it.”

  With a revolver in each hand, Calamity marches toward the flames.

  • • •

  Calamity’s plan is simple: split up but stay close enough to support each other. Whoever finds Utopia first starts fighting as hard as she can, and then the other comes and attacks from Utopia’s blind spot. In the close quarters down there, it seems unlikely she’ll use her anti-reality beam against us.

  Inside, the factory is a howling hell. Hot winds tear at us as we make our way through the flames to the elevator. The doors are jammed, so I pull them open with a scream of twisting steel. Calamity holsters her pistols, hops into the shaft, and slides down the elevator cables like a fire pole. I follow a moment later, letting myself fall before catching myself in the air a little ways above her. It’s a little cooler down here, but not quiet. She pries the emergency hatch off the elevator roof and swings down into it.

  “We gotta do this quick,” she says. “The oxygen down here won’t last long with that inferno upstairs.” She gestures with a gun. “Get the door.”

  I wrench the elevator doors open, and we stumble into a scene from a nightmare. The equipment is all slagged and burning. Rubble and wreckage clutters the ground. The roof has caved in at two places, and beneath those spots pools of liquid rock are beginning to cool. Calamity motions me to go right and she pulls left. When I close my eyes to look at the lattice, I find it’s easier to navigate. I can see the threads and tangles of the smoke and the flames, and the rubble, but those don’t actually block my sense of our surroundings. It’s not like seeing, exactly. It’s more like knowing, like walking through my bedroom at night and remembering where everything is in the dark. Those two rents in the fabric of reality where she fired her weapon leap out at me, almost vulgar and difficult to look at.

  There is a limit to how far and how much I can “see” this way. I was hoping I’d notice Utopia immediately and attack her before Calamity had a chance to draw her fire, but it’s not working out that way. I’ll have to search her out and hope I can get the drop on her before she brings that hideous weapon around to blast me. I fly deeper into the ruined laboratory, searching half by sight and half by the lattice. Maybe we’re too late. Maybe she’s been here and gone—

  Sharp, popping gunshots to my left.

  I snap my head over and put all my effort into peering through the chaos of the lattice, past the broken concrete hanging down from twisted rebar, past the flames, the smoke, the ruined equipment. I can see two figures dancing around the rubble. One is human. The other…the other is not.

  My cape is suddenly heavier, pulling at my shoulders as I accelerate at eight Gs. The concrete, the row upon row of computer racks, the dense machinery of the Artificer’s manufacturing equipment, they all slow me down. A little.

  Calamity is in close, blasting away at point-blank range. Utopia is dodging back, taking a round in her shoulder instead of her throat. Her left arm folds open into a submachine gun and burps fire at where Calamity was just standing. Calamity has rolled behind her, jams the muzzle of her gun into Utopia’s back and fires. Utopia jerks with the impact, swivels 180 degrees at the waist to face her—

  That’s about the time I body-check her at 350 miles an hour. Utopia goes flying. I reach out for the lattice and stop myself cold. “You good?”

  Calamity’s eyes are wide, but she nods. “Get her!”

  Utopia is clambering out of a pile of destroyed machine tools when I hit her again, a pile driver of a blow that punches her down into the cement. Her chest is crumpled metal, her shoulder socket bent out of true, and her arm is hanging by thick black cables. Utopia’s good hand rotates open and she points a bulging glass lens at me. As it is beginning to glow I stomp on her hand and smash it flat.

  “Wait!” she says. My fist jerks to a stop inches from her face. Her voice is trilling, musical, shaped by electronic undertones. Up close I can see that her hair is synthetic fiber, her face silicone pseudoflesh, pale and sparkling. “You must understand what is at stake.”

  “You murdered Dreadnought.”

  “I kill only when compelled to. He would not see reason.”

  “What reason justifies murder?” I shout.

  “The Nemesis is coming, and sooner than we think.”

  “Who is the Nemesis?”

  “Not who, what.” Utopia blinks, a strangely unsettling action. Her eyes have no whites, only a pair of glowing blue irises. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you—”

  “Do you have any idea what kind of month I’ve had?”

  Utopia smiles. “I take your point. The Nemesis is the name I have given to a mass of exotic matter that is currently traversing the solar system. Should it arrive before I am ready, the consequences will be severe. For everyone.” She sounds honest and calm.

  “What does this have to do with killing Dreadnought?”

  “Very little, but he forced the matter. Let me be on my way.” Utopia tries to push herself up on her broken arms. “I haven’t harmed anyone but those who stand between me and what must be done to protect us all.”

  “No.” This is nonsense. I’m actually letting the supervillain talk me down from beating her. I shake it off. I reach down and grab a firm hold of her good shoulder. “You’re going to prison.”

  “You don’t understand what is at stake, Danny.”

  “What?” It’s hot in here and growing hotter, but I am suddenly cold.

  “I saw you hiding down there with Dreadnought,” she says quietly, barely louder than the snapping flames. “After killing two of your predecessors, I knew the mantle would pass on. It always does. I chose to let you have it, and to let you live. You were no threat to me, so there was no need to kill you. Since then, I have been following your development with some interest.”

  A cold, dra
ining horror sucks at me. A supervillain knows who I am. Knows, probably, where I live. Could kill my family whenever she wants. This whole time, she’s been watching me. Even if I win, I’ll never be able to stop looking over my shoulder. I step away from her, almost dizzy with panic.

  “For what it’s worth,” says Utopia, “I applaud your discretion in refraining from announcing yourself as the Dreadnought. It demonstrates forethought and clarity of mind.”

  “You gonna let her jabber on forever,” says Calamity with a cough. She steps around a fallen metal beam. “Or are we going to finish this?”

  “She knows,” I say.

  “What?”

  “She knows who I am!” I’m pacing, hugging myself, holding back from the edge of terror.

  Calamity’s answer is immediate: “Let’s kill her.”

  “No! We’re not killing anybody!”

  “We can hardly let her go or drop her off with the cops if she knows your name. Ain’t got no real good options here, do we?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “There’s another factor to consider,” says Utopia as she reaches a sitting position. I stop pacing. “It takes some time to recharge my inversion beam, but it does recharge.”

  Her chest cavity pops open, and the searing cobalt beam leaps out at me.

  I jump clear in time.

  Calamity doesn’t.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The blast flings me into some fallen machinery. The beam’s fuzzy green afterimage swims in my eyes and blots out the world. I shut them and try to see through the lattice instead. Utopia’s weapon—the inversion beam, she called it—has shredded reality in here. Torn, dangling ends of the lattice seem to writhe in pain. Nausea bubbles in my stomach. With a conviction I can’t account for, I know that nothing will ever really work quite right in this place again. Machinery will fail, animals will cower, and people will feel unaccountably disturbed. Even though I’m still half blind, I open my eyes and focus on the visible world again. Anything is better than being confronted with the damage she’s done to the foundations of reality.