by Matt Adams
“No,” Dad says.
“It’s a different…?”
“Yes.”
“Also crippled…?”
“Weird, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I say. “He thinks my name is Craig?”
“In his reality, Captain Cosmos and Lady Speed named their son Craig,” Dad explains. “You get a lot of variations. Don’t even try to keep track.” He puts his hands up to his head, using his orange powers to mimic an explosion.
I hear a burst of static. “Chaos Prime… Chaos Prime. Do you read?”
“I read you, Mortimer,” my father answers.
“The Bands are starting to make a dent in the Kiltech fleet,” Morty’s static-filled voice says. To emphasize his point, three Kiltech ships turn into balls of fire. “I don’t think we’ll survive another rupture.”
“The Comet just said the same thing,” Dad responds. “We’re getting the Comet Commandos together to make a final run at the Invincible.”
“Copy that. I’ll send what forces I can spare. Mortimer out.”
My father walks through what I presume is our command post, a series of rock formations that remind me of the Rebel base from Star Wars. I think it’s entirely possible that we’re in South America—or at least a place that looks like it.
“The Kiltechs’ infernal machine is doing all of this,” my father says as we continue to walk. I stumble and he steadies me. “They set it off just after you went into the tunnels.”
“I figured they did before we went in. Remember that distraction? The one with the bird people?” I quickly realize that this is one of the stranger conversations I’ve ever had with my father. Considering some of the situations we’ve been in, that’s saying something.
“That was the Mortimer Willoughby from Reality One-Triple—” He pauses and shakes his head. “You know what? I don’t even care where he’s from. The Mortimer who’s been helping you timed that strike. He said one of his Warren Kensingtons has limited abilities to open up gateways. They bailed us out.”
“Morty’s always got a plan,” I muse.
“Well, we could use one right now. We got you into the tunnels, but then the Kiltechs set off their machine. While you were gone, everything split. So, instead of trapping the Bands in that protected zone, the Kiltechs opened a breach that mashed up all realities. It was temporary, though. Some of our forces got a one-way ride to another dimension.”
“We inherited a bunch of copycat heroes?”
Dad puts a hand on my shoulder. “Yes. Also, copycat populations of infinite Earths packed onto one planet. If you thought it was hard to get Super Bowl tickets before, just wait until the population explodes into infinity. The planet won’t be able to take the strain. Our reality becomes no reality. Earth dies. All of them.”
“Seems our friends the Kiltechs aren’t really our friends. Again. Still,” I say, feeling heat rise on my face. Just because I knew the inevitable betrayal would come doesn’t make it sting any less when it actually happens.
We arrive at a clearing where several ribbons of crimson flash through tall grass. A few others touch the sky.
“Quite a few Crimsonstreaks,” Dad says. “They’re all fast, but I’ve looked at the metrics and no one can match you. There is something inherently different about you, Chris.”
Aww… I’m special.
“Whatever your ability is, it is the most refined version of it in the entire multiverse. They based their machine on it. They tried to replicate it with the Bluestreak.”
Clearly, my mind isn’t functioning on a high level; I didn’t even think about him. “Where is he?”
“We haven’t seen any other Bluestreaks,” Dad explains. “We’ve run into quite a few DashBoys, however.”
“Did a DashBoy materialize with me?”
Dad’s eyes study the ground. “He appeared quite a while before you did. The Kiltechs grabbed him.” He puts his hands on my shoulders and looks me square in the eye. “They have their power source.”
“We’d better hustle, then. Where are we launching from?”
Dad points toward the top of an earthen pyramid.
“It won’t take me long to get there,” I say.
“No, it won’t,” he responds.
We disappear in a burst of tangerine light.
We materialize on top of a sun-bleached cliff face several hundred yards away from the Kiltechs’ flagship.
“This is no good,” I say. “We need to get inside the ship.”
“Which obnoxious version of your son is that?” a gruff voice asks from behind.
I turn to find a legion of Crusading Comets standing behind me, all with their arms crossed against variations of the traditional blue armor. Here and there, an odd Comet warrior wears armor of a different color, but blue is remarkably consistent throughout. The Comet troublemaker stands face-to-face with me, a sneer on his lips.
“Which one of you is Warren Kensington?” I ask.
They echo together as if possessed by the Borg, “I am!”
I suppose I asked for that one.
A Crusading Comet to my left smiles broadly, and I give Warren, my Warren, my best Elaine Benes “get out!” shove.
“We have a mag-line ready to tether us to the ship,” he says. “No one can teleport in and they’ve fortified their defenses against Band tech. We’re going in with a few old-fashioned tricks.”
“They don’t have a force field?” I ask.
“They’re trying to power up their device, Chris. A force field would contain the surge. It’s because of the dually redundant power matrix protocols,” he explains, pausing as he notices my glazed-over eyes. “You know how a Klingon Bird of Prey can’t fire phasers when it’s cloaked?”
A knowing smile spreads across my lips.
Warren shakes his head. “If that helps you.”
A second later, dozens of Crusading Comets draw their grapplers and launch them at the immense hull of the Invincible. Warren grabs me around the waist and we relive the scene from Star Wars where Luke and Leia swing across the chasm, minus the Stormtroopers, blaster bolts, and kiss.
It’s really more like a zipline anyway.
Twin puffs of smoke pop from the hull and a hangar door opens, painfully slowly. A couple of the Comets mistime their jumps, slamming into the platform and skidding off. They get a lift from my Crusading Comet, Warren Senior, who snags them with his recently endowed Indigo powers.
Warren and I roll onto the deck with several other Comet Commandos. My father uses his Orange Band powers to glide in.
“I thought you said those things didn’t work on Kiltech ships,” I say, pointing at Dad’s headband.
“They still work, they just can’t use them to teleport. The hull’s shielded against that,” Warren explains. A projector from his wrist shows us a bright blue schematic. Only one area of the diagram is of interest—a bright, blue-white orb that grows strong for several seconds before weakening. The cycle repeats several times. “Power fluctuations,” Warren says matter-of-factly. “Interesting.
“Alpha Group, Beta Group, Gamma Group! Move! Now! Delta, Epsilon, Zeta! Move! Kappa Group, you’re with me!”
The Comet Commandos move obediently through the hangar bay, leaving only Warren, my father, and me.
I get it: we’re Kappa Group.
“Just try to keep up, okay?” Warren says. “The rest of the commandos are supposed to draw the Kiltechs’ attention. We’re hoping to slip through relatively unopposed.”
“Our squad isn’t that big. We could use a few more hands,” I say.
“How about wings?”
A majestic war-screech erupts in the hangar, and Falcon Gray leads a large group of his fellow birdmen into the area. Jaci and Miss Lightspeed accompany them, but I’m not sure if they’re my versions of Jaci and my mother.
“You’re late,” Warren says, irritated.
“Stow it, Comet Junior,” Jaci chides. Okay, I’m pretty sure she’s the real deal.
Falcon Gray’s head seems to move in eighty directions at once. “We had to finish the diversion. Otherwise, the Kiltech crows would have detected your intrusion.” At this point, the birdman makes a sound startlingly like a Jurassic Park dilophosaurus.
No goofy neck fringe, thankfully. No poisonous loogey, either.
“Easy there, easy,” I say, taking a second to ruffle the feathers on Falcon Gray’s neck. It seems to calm him down. “What’s wrong?”
“Many warriors arrived, but they are not from my homeworld. The great rupture unleashed an Earth where birds became the dominant life forms. They do not like the thought of existing only in their reality.”
My eyes dart to Falcon Gray’s colleagues. There are a lot of them, but a few stand out. A slightly built bird with blue feathers stands beside a slightly taller variation with the same build and feather pattern. The second birdman looks somewhat stouter, and holds one wing a little stiffly. A shorter, regal-looking bird holds its arm-wings out in front of it, revealing white feather tips that look almost like gloves. Beside them stands a gawky, reed-like bird with a brilliant red breast. Its head darts back and forth at a much quicker pace than the others. Next to the red bird, an imposing bird with oil-black feathers remains relatively still. To his left stands a thickly built bird with a shock of tousled feathers on its head.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I say.
“These are infinite universes we’re dealing with, son. Although I didn’t expect this particular development.” Dad’s cocking his head at his counterpart in an ironically birdlike fashion.
“All it proves is that somewhere, there’s an Earth with a crimson-colored amoeba that moves a lot faster than everyone else,” I say. The bird with the crimson breast nuzzles me with its beak. If only I could describe how weird it feels.
“Can these guys talk?” Dad asks.
Falcon Gray squawks in Morse code and his bird warriors erupt in an irritating symphony of cacophonous grunts and chirps.
“I am afraid the only language they understand is their own,” Falcon Gray says. “It is similar enough to the voice of the Great Nest from Aviary XII that we can communicate, although I admit it is quite possible I just instructed them to eat you.” Falcon Gray tilts his head. “But I do not think that is the case.”
A new group of Kiltech soldiers pours into the hangar, but before they can squeeze off a shot, the great flock of bird warriors sets upon them with incredible fury. Within seconds, Kiltech helmets, heads, armor, and limbs litter the shining hangar bay floor.
“They’re not messing around,” I tell Warren, clamping a hand over my mouth.
“My kind makes the best fighters,” Falcon Gray boasts.
And that is why no one should make fun of Falcon Gray. I will never doubt the birdman again.
Warren seeks out a wall-mounted computer console, produces a flash drive, plugs it into some sort of ill-conceived Kiltech adapter, and then shoves the clunky-looking device into a port embedded in the wall. Before I even ask what he’s doing, the huge hangar bay door closes and a white door at the end of the space creaks open.
Warren points at the closed bay door. “That’ll keep them from bothering us for a bit.” He tilts his head toward our new exit. “That door will take us right into their main corridor.”
“Main corridor, he says!” I yell while staring down a dull, gunmetal wall. “Looks more like a maintenance closet to me. Is that a Dyson?” I ask, pointing to a ridiculous-looking yellow device clearly used for… something. Something undoubtedly stupid.
“This is not what the schematics told me,” Warren protests, flustered. His fingers glide over his wrist communicator with admirable speed and accuracy. “This is supposed to take us to the main hub.”
“It’s a dead end,” Dad says, folding his arms across his chest. He’s already tried blasting the obstruction with his Orange Band powers, but it doesn’t do much good. He says his powers have only limited use within the confines of the Invincible and I’m inclined to believe him.
A few seconds ago, the white door leading us here closed as several dozen Kiltech soldiers bypassed Warren’s lockdown and flooded the hangar bay. There’s an awful lot of us trapped in this little room.
“You know, it’s not gonna take them long to figure out what happened to us,” Warren says.
I’m fifty-fifty on whether he meant to make a Star Wars reference.
Most of Falcon Gray’s bird crew split off on their own, but the man-bird and his Comet/Morty/Crimsonstreak/Chaos/Lightspeed analogues stay behind. They certainly don’t talk very much, which is fine by me. I’ve had enough screeching and chirping to sustain me for a long, long time.
“I can’t move this thing,” Dad says. “I can’t burn through it either. The Band is either running low or ineffective against Kiltech tech. Maybe both. But we need to get through.”
Falcon Gray relays the situation to his sextet of bird buddies. Before we know it, all six of them careen into the large gray wall, which buckles and then collapses under their collective onslaught. My mother gives them a hand.
“I’ll be,” Warren says. “This is the right place. That was just a blast door.”
With the hiss of escaping gas, another blast door descends. Before it hits, one of the bird warriors moves underneath and holds the door up until the whole group gets through. When everyone is out, the man-bird rolls through, letting the heavy door crash to the ground.
Damn, who’d’ve thought hollow bones were so strong?
A voice yells over a PA system in the Kiltechs’ guttural language.
In my mind, I translate it as, “Open the blast door! Open the blast door!”
The heavy door rises momentarily before surrendering to the floor with a metallic clank.
“It’s a clear shot to the main lab from here,” Warren says, urging us forward. “According to the databanks, the ship is only lightly defended—it’s a skeleton crew aboard. The majority of personnel are planetside, trying to beat back the Bands.”
Despite Warren’s assurances, we encounter Kiltech resistance, but Falcon Gray’s friends are more than up to the task, clawing, slashing, and pecking the enemy into submission. Seriously, damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. Hitchcock would be proud.
The main lab is right where Dad and the High Imperator left it, although what was once a pair of bright blue shafts of light at the center is now an ever-changing column of shifting yellows and reds. I presume the Bluestreak is trapped in the circular enclosure next it. I catch a glimpse of blue through a thin window, confirming my theory.
Dad rushes up to one of the control panels. “This thing is set on an auto-timer. I’ll try the override.” His fingers move gracefully across the Kiltech touchscreen. “They’ve changed their security protocols. My codes won’t work.”
He turns to Warren, and the computer whiz tries plugging his clunky flash drive device into a slot below the screen. His hands, too, speed over the touch display, but he keeps shaking his head in frustration. “The encryption is too complicated for me to crack right now. I don’t have the time.” He touches a non-button on the screen, conjuring a giant red countdown that reads “3 MINUTES.”
The walls of the lab slide up and Kiltech soldiers marshal into the room, firing their weapons. Jaci and my mother rise into the air. My father tries to create one of his orange shields, but he can’t do it. He spins, looks up at my mother, “Karen! Buy us some time!”
My mother dodges several blasts and topples a knot of Kiltech grunts. Falcon Gray and the rest of Wild Kingdom join in, clawing and delivering multiple Pecks of a Thousand Deaths. While Dad and Warren continue to work on an increasingly futile attempt to override the system, I stand in front of the enclosure and watch as the Bluestreak continues to run in circles. He’s stranded in a training centrifuge that forces him to keep running.
Another display sits beside the bubble, but before I can touch it, a shadow looms over me. Thick sausage fingers close around my shoulders and then whip me
around to the other side of the room. Jaci catches me before I hit.
“Do not disrupt the power source,” Kilgore says. “We are on the verge of eliminating the Bands once and for all. A nuisance no one will have to worry about any longer.”
The display now reads two minutes, thirty seconds.
“What you’re doing will destroy Earth. Not just our Earth, mind you, but all Earths. Maybe all everything. It’s catastrophic enough to create some major multiversal instability,” Dad says, throwing a punch that the alien chieftain blocks. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“Again, you cling to an overinflated opinion of your world’s importance,” Kilgore asserts. “No matter. Perhaps your Earth must be sacrificed, but we are incapable of destroying all of them. Some vestige of your puny civilization will survive elsewhere in the multiverse.”
Two minutes.
Dad tries to deliver another strike, but Kilgore blocks it. My father produces a weak beam of orange energy that fizzles before it hits his opponent.
“You powers will not work here,” he says smugly, driving my father to his knees. He holds him down and removes the Orange Band.
“You better give him a hand,” Jaci says, nodding toward Dad.
I look over at the Crusading Comets. Both are surrounded.
“I think they could use your help,” I tell her.
I burst into Crimsonspeed and knock Kilgore on his ass.
“Not so intimidating now, are we?” I taunt, looking over my shoulder to see Warren hit a group of Kiltechs with a few Comet Stars. His father—like my father—isn’t having much luck with his magic headband powers, but even a one-armed Comet is a formidable foe. Encircled by Kiltechs, he fires his grappler as they charge. They crash into one another, but an errant shot cuts his line. Jaci catches him before he falls, landing softly on the metal deck.
Always the strong one, that girl.
I risk a glance at the timer: one minute.
I make a move toward the enclosure and pound on the glass. “Stop running, dammit! Bluestreak!”
More Kiltech soldiers materialize inside the laboratory as Kilgore rises to his feet. He’s too close for comfort, but I spin back toward the panel. It’s no use; overriding computer systems is work for people like my father and Warren.