Full Metal Superhero (Book 6): Explosive Arsenal

by Haskell, Jeffery H.

  Explosive Arsenal Copyright © 2018 by Jeffery H. Haskell. All Rights Reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Cover designed by Vividcovers.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jeffery H. Haskell

  Visit my website at www.jefferyhhaskell.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing: Sep 2018

  Molten Press

  There are so many people who help and support me I can’t even begin to recognize all of them here. This one, though, is for the fans. Thank you for letting me tell stories for a living.

  Glossary

  The Protectors:

  Arsenal/Amelia Lockheart.

  Domino/Kate Petrenelli: Amelia’s best friend.

  Fleet/Thomas Anthony Shaw.

  Glacier/Monica Pavlenco.

  TK/Tessa Harper (sometimes people call her Tess).

  Lux/Augustina Luciana Maxima: Alien with the ability to control light.

  The Doctor/Teddy Contee.

  Major Force/Luke Lancaster: Amelia’s boyfriend.

  The Protector/Carlos Rodrigo Dominguez: Amelia’s longtime friend.

  Epic/None: Amelia’s personal AI and friend.

  Milton/None: AI created by Epic.

  Other Heroes:

  Catia Tichenor “Tia”/None: Affiliated with the Buenos Aires Police.

  Triple Threat/Dwayne: Formally on the California team.

  Aeon/Real name unknown. Last seen in Inescapable Arsenal.

  Locations:

  The Spire: Home base of Amelia and the Protectors.

  UltraMax: The special prison in North Dakota for super powered criminals.

  Secret Hospital in Seattle: Where Dr. Grace worked to help Amelia’s parents.

  Villains:

  The Th’un/None: Aliens that tried to strip mine Earth.

  The Red Mage/Ricardo Rico Rafael (D): Wanted to destroy all supers in the world. Last seen in Unbreakable.

  The Armory/Unknown: The team that beat the snot out of Amelia in ‘Unbreakable.’

  The Engineer/Unknown: Built the suits for the Armory and the giant bank robbing robots from Unbreakable.

  The Red Gem/Unknown: Mysterious, mind controlling, power boosting entity that currently controls Luke.

  Heart/Unknown: The mind-controlling witch from Unbreakable.

  The Death Dealers/Mercenary scum: Last seen in Unstoppable.

  Hand Cannon/Unknown: Creates massive explosions from his hand.

  Colossal/Unknown: Grows to enormous sizes and gains strength.

  Rocket/Unknown: Flies with a rocket like projection and shoot fireballs.

  Government Agents:

  Bricklayer/Unknown: US Marshal, F4 strength and invulnerability. Seen in Books 1 and 2.

  Major Nelson/None: The Airforce officer who is Amelia’s liaison in the Pentagon.

  Amelia’s Parents:

  John and Hope Lockheart.

  Technical Stuff:

  ZPFM: Zero Point Field Module.

  IP Cannon: Ion Pulse (Amelia’s super-Taser).

  Emdrive: Electromagnetic propulsion (Google “Impossible Drive” for more info).

  Emjet: Amelia’s private jets, outfitted with her Emdrive.

  HUD: Heads Up Display.

  ECM: Electronic Counter Measures.

  EMI: Electromagnetic Interference.

  RF: Radio Frequency.

  EW: Electronic Warfare.

  Computronium: A nano-particle with atoms that form processors allowing Epic to fully load himself into any of Amelia’s suits.

  Faraday Cage: A copper or iron metallic surface with a low-level electrical current running through it; blocks all radio transmissions.

  GPS: Global Positioning System.

  Sword O’ Doom: Monomolecular blade, can cut through anything.

  Lockheed: Small flying drone first seen in Alien Arsenal.

  Luke is gone. Taken. At the Spire everyone looks to me for answers and I don’t have any. Which is why I’m flying over the desert with nothing but scrub brush and cacti as far as the eye can see. I need quiet to think, and it doesn’t get any quieter than this.

  I set the armor down in a swirl of sand and scattering Leopard lizards, then let the engines wind down and allow the quiet to invade my thoughts for a few seconds before I speak.

  “Epic, will you walk me through this one more time?” I ask my faithful AI companion. Epic and I have been together a long time. I trust him to set me straight.

  The gem emanates a low-level RF emission that can best be described as an alpha wave. When Luke entered the room he must have been a match for the gem’s alpha wave emissions. It ‘locked’ on and—in essence—overrode his brain.

  I try to wrap my head around this. Even if I were a match it wouldn’t affect me. I have too many fail-safes for mind control, including an ECM barrier built into my chair. When I’m sitting in it, I’m encompassed in a rolling Faraday cage that would prevent just such a thing from happening.

  But Luke...

  I came out here to think, away from the team and the enquiring eyes of the staff. They all look to me for answers and I don’t have any for them. At least now I know the “how.”

  It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours since he vanished. The first twenty-four are crucial to finding a missing person. Luke, though, isn’t missing per se. He ran off, sort of.

  Alpha waves beg the question... “Can we track them?”

  I can use a number of open-source RF antennas to look for the right emissions, but they are few and far between. It is too faint for us to track from Artemis. Luke would virtually have to walk by a scanner for us to detect him. I will start scanning immediately of course. I am also using Internet tracking algorithms to look for any trace of him. If he appears in a photo, is mentioned in a Facebook post, or shows up on YouTube, I will know about it.

  I kick a rock in frustration, watching the object of my anger sail across the soil to land with a thud thirty feet away.

  “Retract helmet,” I order. The faceplate shifts up and folds into the helmet, which then pulls down into the shoulders of the armor. I’m wearing my flight variant—one of a variety of different versions now available, all based around the same core design. This suit has minimal weapons but allows for faster flight than any of my other suits. It’s also the nimblest of them, making me feel like I’m hardly wearing anything on top of my clothes.

  I take a deep breath and try to relax. Try to clear my mind and see a solution. But I can’t. All I can see is the look on Luke’s face. It’s like he was crazed. Please oh please let his mind be okay? God, what if it erased him the way Ericsson took over people? No… no, I can’t think like that.

  “Helmet on,” I say as I mentally engage the Emdrive. In my new suit, I have the base core of Animetal connecting it to me like tendons in a body. Which means I have the enhanced strength of my Animetal armor and some of the nerve control as well, allowing me a finer degree of control than my standard suit.

  The only other way to simulate strength was with my kinetic manipulators—which works, but not exactly the way I want. The solution with the Animetal core ends up being the best of both worlds: it has the hard shell
of my old armor on top of my kinetic shields, plus the strength and reinforced superstructure of my Animetal armor.

  I miss being able to control everything mentally. The way the new version of the synthsuit combines with my Animetal tendons, I can only control some of the suit with nerve impulses—primarily flight. Everything else uses my eye-tracking HUD or voice commands.

  A layer of computronium in the suit allows Epic to travel with me… to keep Argentina from ever happening again. I have a version of my suit that folds into a wheelchair and one on the Emjet on top of my quantum room. No matter where I go, I will always have a suit with me—I won’t rely on just one delivery method anymore, nor on only having one suit. I also try to keep at least twenty percent of Epic’s computational power working on new designs night and day.

  I shoot through the sky, breaking the sound barrier as I go, letting the concussive force from the speed calm my turbulent thoughts. Flying has got to be the best part of having the suit. I wouldn’t trade this for anything. Epic throws a course on the HUD for me to follow back to the Spire. A clock pops up, counting down my ETA. I lean to the right and the suit adjusts, taking a lazy right turn until it lines up with the virtual path.

  Incoming priority call from Kate.

  “Amelia, where are you right now?” my best friend asks.

  I check my altitude and speed with a quick glance before answering. “Uh, about... twenty-two thousand feet above the Arizona desert,” I tell her.

  An explosion of static drowns out her reply. When the interference dies down, I can hear her again.

  “Can you stop? Carlos and I need your help out here in California.”

  If Carlos needs help, there has to be a significant threat to life. But why just those two? Where’s the rest of the team? I know Carlos goes off and does his own thing often. He has rules he has to follow, rules given him by the oracle of Apollo.

  Despite my doubts about the ancient Greek gods being alive in another dimension, I find myself missing Pythia. She certainly made life interesting.

  “Yeah, give me ten seconds,” I tell her. “Epic, red alert!” I throw the suit into a full stop, grunting as G’s slip by my kinetic manipulators. The familiar green of my HUD vanishes as red takes over, highlighting combat systems, flight, and the electronic warfare suite. The armor reconfigures slightly as well. Extra plates on my back which normally help with flight stability, shift around to reinforce my vitals.

  Kate appears with a pop of displaced air. Her black form-fitting body suit and combat boots look as perfect as ever. I notice she has her bandoleer of non-lethal grenades strapped to her torso, along with both the IP pistols I designed for her. She also has her own versions of the Sword O’ Doom: a pair of twenty-four inch long blades strapped to her back.

  She slaps the front of my armor, catching the hand holds I have purposely installed for just this event. “Hang on,” she says with a grin. Quantum teleportation isn’t my favorite thing in the world—I end up feeling like I left my stomach behind and it’s running to catch up.

  The Arizona landscape vanishes, replaced by a jarring smashup of California city and farmland. I think most people forget how many farms there are on in the Golden State. My GPS flags the town as Lompoc, population forty-seven thousand.

  We appear in the middle of state highway 246, where the road heads west toward the coast through a bunch of farmland. I immediately see what the problem is.

  “Are the rest of the Protectors on the way?” I ask Kate.

  She shakes her head. “There’s a four-alarm fire in Phoenix they’re fighting. It’s just us, come on!” she shouts as she vanishes in a pop of displaced air.

  The two-lane highway is a mess of overturned cars and abandoned vehicles. Firetrucks coming from the city to the East, wail as they approach, along with police and EMTs. Whatever happened, just happened. I see the thing that probably called for Carlos to be here. A series of school buses line the side of the road disgorging children running into the nearest field and away from the fight up ahead.

  “Full power to all weapons,” I tell Epic.

  Done.

  I blast through the air, flipping over to give myself a birds-eye view of the battlefield. And it is a battlefield. People flee in every direction. Ahead, there is an overturned military truck with an orbital rocket payload dumped on the side of the road with its casing peeled back like a grape.

  That’s when I see him. Or “hims?” Not sure what the plural for one person is. Epic identifies him as Multiplex the self-proclaimed “One-man army.” I hate when the villains have taglines. He’s dressed in worn-out clothes that look like he stole them from a homeless man.

  “Epic, give me the run down on this fool.”

  He has the ability to replicate himself, with the apparent potential to do so an infinite number of times. It is unknown if he is his replicates or if they are merely clones that he controls. The danger comes in his ability to absorb the properties of whatever he touches. He can only maintain one set at a time, but all his duplicates have the same abilities as whatever he absorbs. In this case, he seems to have absorbed something from the SLS rocket he has destroyed.

  “Oh, that’s what that is,” I say, glancing back the way we came. I don’t know how much those things cost, but they’re easily in the double-digit millions. I land on top of an abandoned SUV with all its doors open. This is a lot to take in. Epic starts tagging Multiplex’s clones, showing me the locations and highlighting them so they are easier to see in the mass of people trying to flee, while Carlos, The Protector, goes toe-to-toe with Multiplex’s partner.

  I think I’d pay money to watch this fight. His name is Galactic Knight, and he’s one of the newer bad guys to show up. He’s dressed in fantasy looking plate armor—not the real stuff, but a movie idea of it. Sleek, form-fitting, and dull gray color. He fights with what history would call an arming sword, paired with a kite shield. The shield and the sword glow with a dark light that defies classification. It sparks like two battery leads touching every time he strikes Carlos’ shield, Aegis.

  He is an F5 in both strength and invulnerability. It is unclear if his abilities are because of his armor and weapons or if he generates them.

  “Awesome. Okay, Carlos has him, let’s focus on Multiplex. Any idea who the original is?”

  While Epic scans the crowd for the possible source of the army of clones, I start taking the fight to them. I jump up in the air and do an Emdrive assisted slam on one as he runs for a white sedan that still has people in it. I’m not sure if he’s trying to hurt them or if he’s trying to keep us distracted; I guess it doesn’t matter. I come down hard on him, riding his head into the asphalt. The ground shatters and spiderwebs on impact. He starts to push up, trying to shrug me off, which surprises the heck out of me.

  “IP Canon, tight beam, full strength.” From point blank range I fire into the back of his head. He spasms as the nerve signal-disrupting energy arcs around him like a Tazer on steroids. He twitches for a second before falling flat on his face. “It’s about dang time,” I cheer in triumph. My frigging IP canons haven’t had the best track record of late.

  I check the people in the car; they’re trying to get out but it looks like another car collided with them and jammed their doors. I leap over the vehicle, dig my fingers into the frame of the door and heave. It rips off with no resistance and I let it sail behind me into the dirt. I give the woman driving a thumbs up and she weekly returns it.

  There are fifty-seven versions of Multiplex. Currently, Kate is dispatching one every seven seconds. I am still not sure if lethal force will hurt the original, so I suggest using the least amount needed.

  “Any idea what they’re after?” I ask him as I leap into the air, leaving the people in the car to take care of themselves.

  I have scanned the databases and websites we have access to and have not found anything of use. Would you like me to go into the NASA computers?

  “No, let’s keep the felonies to a minimum. We
’ll deal with whatever it is when the time comes.”

  I zap another Multiplex, taking him down before hitting another one. There has to be a reason they’re here. I can’t imagine—

  “Amelia, look out!” I hear Carlos warn me, too late. A car slams into me, knocking me from the air and crashing me into the ground before coming to rest on top of me.

  “Ow,” I say as I push against the car. It lifts off me a lot easier than I think it should. Mostly because Carlos lifts it up and tosses the vehicle into the empty field with one hand.

  “You okay?”

  You have multiple contusions. Luckily, the majority of the energy was absorbed by the kinetic shields.

  “Epic says I’m fine.”

  That is not even remotely what I said.

  “Uh-huh. I can’t seem to stop this guy, he takes everything I have and gives it right back to me. We’re too evenly matched—wanna trade?” Carlos asks. With his helmet on I can only see his eyes, nose, and mouth. Sweat beads on his forehead from the fight, but he has a smile on his face.

  “You think I can take him?” I ask.

  “The pen is mightier and all that,” he says.

  I nod. “Fine, take down as many Multiplexes as you can.” He claps me on the shoulder and leaps past me. Fifty feet away, Galactic Knight swipes his sword uselessly at Kate who dances around him like a mosquito, slashing at him with her swords in an attempt to cut his skin.

  “Epic, spin up Rockem Sockem.”

  Advanced Pugilist Variant loaded and ready.

  “Initiate!”

  Since I decided to focus on specialized suits, a lot of problems I had trying to make one suit do everything, became far easier to conquer. It only takes thirty seconds to switch suits if I need to, since my base suit remains the same. I’m just adding on to whatever I’m already wearing. The quantum gate opens up beneath me and I fall through and past the initial staging area. The nets retract since I don’t need them. I bypass the synthsuit sprayer and go right to the articulating arm, which grabs me. A dozen other arms come out of the wall, removing the flight suit before bringing the much bulkier and far stronger Rockem Sockem suit online.