“Amelia, I’m monitoring your vital signs from the jet—please try to take it easy on your leg. I shouldn’t have to tell you the danger you’re putting yourself in by using your armor,” Teddy says over the comms.
“Yet, you are.” I point out.
“That says more about you than me,” he retorts.
“Fine, fine. I’ll be careful. We have to move on this, though. They have been one step ahead of us since we ran into them in Phoenix. I want them off my radar in a bad way.”
He doesn’t respond, and I don’t blame him for cautioning me. I do take a lot of risks, but I only get one life, one shot to do it right. If I don’t do this now I may never get another chance at them. The world is quiet, Carlos is available, the team is up above me in the stealth jet—if we can lure them out into a confrontation we can take them all down and be done with it.
I spot the radio tower that marks the beginning of the land Strungel purchased before his death. The silo itself is a mile past this point. The mountains shoot up a half mile in the distance. Tree’s cover the landscape all the way up and around. It’s so unlike Phoenix I almost feel like I’m on an alien planet.
I flip over, turning north, eyes scanning for the hatch, then I see it. Nestled at the base of a steep climb, the hatch sticks out despite years of neglect. I land with a thump on the roof.
“Epic?”
Scanning. I am picking up RF signals. There is undoubtedly an active wireless network of some kind here.
While he does his thing I compare the hatch to the blueprints we downloaded from the DoD. According to them, there is an access stairwell and elevator fifty feet to the north... there it is. I hop off the hatch into the dirt and walk over. The MK VII is a little twitchy as I walk, my movements a little too sharp, I’m gonna have to dial back the interface a tad when we get back. I’ve never felt more protected though. If the Armory is here, they’re in for a big surprise.
Even still, a tremor of fear runs through me, or maybe it’s anxiety. The last time I faced them they nearly killed me. I open and close my hands trying to calm myself.
Amelia, the hatch is opening.
I spin around as the hatch slides open on near-silent rails. No way it’s not maintained. The lift inside, designed to raise and lower the missile in and out of the silo, lifts up the six armored figures I haven’t seen since they tried to kill me. They rise up slowly, like a boy band coming up into a concert. Except, I’m not cheering. My heart’s pounding my chest and I’m waiting for Teddy to call and berate me for taking such a risk.
The last time we fought they nearly killed me. They had countermeasures for to all of my defenses, a way to bypass my shields, immunity to my best weapons, and they were stronger than me. Not so now. The MK VII is purpose-built, designed from the ground up to kick their butts.
So that is what I’m going to do.
“You must have a death wish,” Alpha One says as he pulls the two-handed sledgehammer from his back.
“I’m going to give you all this one chance; surrender, tell me where to find Strungel, and you might get out of this in one piece,” I say over the PA.
“We kicked your ass before. You think you’re going to win now? Take a look around you. It’s six-to-one. We know your little buddies are off in New York fighting some big bad supervillain. You’re out here all alone and you’re going to die. Today.”
If they could see in my helmet I’d give the game away. Smirking almost always gives the game away. One of the things I noticed since I returned from my extended nap was that every time I was in trouble, some huge event was taking place that demanded my allies attention. Specifically, Carlos. Almost like someone was trying to take him out of play. Well, this time I’m one step ahead of them—with a little help from Epic and a fake news broadcast.
I’m guessing that me knowing the name of their boss caught them off guard. Three looks to One sharply. The others stiffen as if they weren’t expecting it. Well, they aren’t going to expect what happens next.
One waves his hand at the rest of his team. “Just because she knows, doesn’t mean she knows anything else.” He clearly says that for my benefit since they can communicate without making any noise. They start to fan out, pulling their weapons as they go.
“Have it your way,” I say out loud. To Epic, “BFG, please.”
Affirmative.
I may not have a lot of the alloy from the aliens, but I learned lessons from them. The BFG is my mass driver rifle, railgun, whatever you want to call it. I reach behind me and pull the two-foot block off my lower back and as I bring it forward the parts expand so by the time I’m shouldering it, the rifle is fully extended and ready to fire.
Two leaps in front of me, shield up and glowing. She hits the ground and the EMP weapon detonates, sending out a wave of disruptive electromagnetic energy. This time I’m ready. This suit has four different ZPFMs, each one powering its own subsystem. I have one for the metallic ink coating covering the suit, and the built-in Faraday cage heats up as it disperses the massive shockwave of EMP energy around me. The ink glitters like diamonds in the sunlight. I had them in my old suit, but they were passive. In the MK VII, they have their own ZPFM to defend against EMPs and other EMI.
“Oh no,” I say in an over exaggerated voice, “She upgraded.” The targeting reticule lines up right on her shield and I pull the trigger. Supercapacitors in the rifle charge in a heartbeat then disperse the energy to the EM coils in the rifle’s barrel. It isn’t 30 megajoules, but it’s enough to spit fire out the barrel as the ten-millimeter piece of nickel-iron wrapped around a tungsten core shoots out toward her at five thousand feet per second. Which is about one and half times faster than a Phalanx defense gun on an aircraft carrier.
Two jerks back as the energy impacts her shield, the nickel-iron explodes but the tungsten core goes right through her shield, then through her side. She flies backward as the round exits her back with a good portion of her insides. She lands in a lump and doesn’t move. I can’t imagine she’s not dead, but she’s the one who decided to kill people, not me. Any guilt I might feel is erased by the bodies strewn about the street from when they detonated the transformer across from Starbucks.
“Son of a bitch! Sienna!” Three screams. He runs at me with his spear held high. I don’t have time to shift my aim. I drop the rifle and leap into the air. While I can take a lot of damage in the new suit, I don’t want to risk it with his spear, or One’s hammer, or any of the other weapons they have. Emdrives whine as they carry me clear of the ground.
A second later the rumble of jet engines fills the sky as they all lift off after me. “Epic, tank missile.”
On it.
The double-barreled grenade launcher on my back reconfigures, both barrels coming together to form a single large bore capable of firing our kinetic kill weapon. It’s essentially another mas driver, but like my rifle, not nearly as big and dangerous as the SDF-1. At the same time, I’m not fighting alien ships, I don’t need a ship killer.
I spin around, facing them as they come after me. When I fought them before, I made the mistake of trying to show them up. I should have gone all out the second we engaged but I wanted to prove I was tougher than them. Now I just want to win.
“Target the one with the net and fire.”
Five armored figures fly up after me, leaving trails of fire behind them as they accelerate. They can probably break the speed of sound. How quaint. However, I’m not trying to get away, just force them to fight me on my terms, not theirs.
Target acquired. Amelia, there is a high probability this will kill him.
I sigh. Taking a life should never be easy, but what am I to do? If I don’t stop them here and now, every life they take after this is on me. I have enough innocent blood on my hands. A little guilty blood will hardly be noticed.
“I know, buddy. Fire.”
Eight inches of osmium encased tungsten erupts from my shoulder mount, leaving a trail of fire and blinding yellow light. The armored figure known as
Six never even knew what hit him. At three-thousand miles per hour the arrow impacts him before his nerves even have time to tell his brain he’s in trouble. His armor explodes from the massive release of kinetic energy, showering the area behind him with flames and debris. Any organic remains would be fried to a crisp if not flat out vaporized into component carbons.
A fusillade of bullets ricochet off me as they return fire, more out of fear than any hope they can bring me down. I circle around, letting them chase me as I drop down to the treetops. Engines whine from the exertion of moving so much mass around tight turns and high G’s that would, as Mr. Parker said, “make a fighter pilot cry.”
“Amelia, we’re in position,” Carlos tells me over the radio. Excellent.
I let Epic acknowledge him and I focus on the stringing the Armory along. While they’ve been chasing me, the team set up around the silo. Kate and TK have infiltrated it in hopes of recovering any evidence before the Armory or Strungel have a chance to realize the game is afoot. Hopefully, they will take Strungel unaware—if he is even there.
I come back around, kick in the afterburners (so-to-speak) and break the sound barrier a few feet above the ground. They chase me, burning up their fuel trying to bring me in range of their weapons again. A few seconds later I throw on the brakes and slam into the ground back where we started, sliding to a halt in the dirt and grass.
“Epic, locate the rifle.”
Located.
While I wait for them, I put it back in storage mode and attach it to my back. A few seconds later they slam into the ground in a semi-circle around me, one at a time, landing in the order as when they took off. I glance over at Two’s body—she hasn’t moved and blood has pooled underneath her. I try to remind myself that I don’t have a choice here.
It’s a hollow reminder.
“I don’t know what your game is, Arsenal, but we’re going to tear you limb from limb for what you’ve done,” One growls at me.
“I warned you,” I say. “Retract faceplate,” I tell Epic. The faceplate slides up, removing my HUD and letting me see them with my own eyes.
“Amelia, there isn’t anyone else here,” Kate tells me over the radio. “Milton’s accessing their computers right now and says he’ll have it all downloaded in a few seconds.”
“Okay,” I tell her.
“Okay, what?” One asks.
“This. Now.”
In a blur of speed Fleet drops off Glacier, and appears next to her. Lux bursts out over the trees in her near light form, almost blinding the Armory as she hovers above me. Then the spear falls from the sky, shaking the ground with its tremendous impact, followed by The Protector a second later.
“No! They’re not supposed to be here. He promised! What do we do?” Five asks his team out loud.
“I have an AI with trillions of computing cycles just laying about doing nothing. How hard do you think it was to fake a news story so you thought I was alone? You caught me by surprise once, good on you. Never again. Surrender,” I say again.
“You know what he said he would do if we were captured,” One tells his crew. He hefts his hammer and charges me. Which isn’t at all what I expected. They’re not being forced, which is clear, but they are being coerced, at least not to surrender.
Lux flares to light and I hear her hands slap together and a beam of light splits the sky above my helmet, striking One in the chest. My faceplate slams down automatically to protect me from the heat and light. Her laser blast makes my particle beams look like a flashlight. The beam burns a four-inch hole in One’s chest and right out the back and he falls over dead.
The remaining three toss their weapons on the ground, dropping to their knees a second later. “We surrender,” Four says as he drops to his knees next to the sword he wielded.
“Good call,” I say.
The three remaining members of the Armory march onto the armored truck, sans their armor. They shoot me dirty looks as the US Marshals march their defeated butts onto the transport van.
The team stands together, all of us watching while our prize is locked up. The two who didn’t make it have sheets over them on the ground where they fell. Of course, the one I exploded doesn’t have anything.
Amelia, Milton has successfully downloaded all of their information. This appears to be a base of operations and repair for the Armory. Strungel has not used it since he joined Rafael in Argentina.
“Any chance he’s still down there? We really need to track this fool down. I don’t know what he told the Armory would happen to them if they surrendered but the sooner we find him the sooner—”
Amelia, incoming!
“Down,” I yell to the marshals.
Fleet moves so fast I don’t even see the blur. The marshals just vanish as the massive object falls from the sky and slams into the roof of the armored truck. Metals, glass, and flesh explode outward as the armored car collapses in the middle like a boulder hit it. I can’t imagine anyone inside is still alive.
Epic flares out the shields to protect Monica from the worst of the debris as the shockwave rolls over us. Lux shoots up into the sky, flaring brightly as she goes.
“I don’t see—” she starts to say when a chunk of engine slams into her, knocking her out of the sky to crash into the ground behind us.
Oh no. No. Please don’t let it be—
Luke lumbers out of the wreckage of the armored truck. He’s ten feet tall and at least half as wide. His chest heaves up and down as he breathes in whole liters of air every second. His pants are intact but his shirt is torn off. In the center of his chest, the Red Gem gleams from its place embedded in his sternum. The remains of the truck burst into flames.
Fleet appears in an eye blink, hurtling a hundred stones at Luke, who just shrugs them off before punching the ground with enough force to open a crater. Fleet stumbles backward and I only manage to stay upright because Epic hits the Emdrive and we lift off.
“Glacier, freeze him,” I order.
Monica slaps her hands together, instantly shifting from human to ice queen. Blue beams shoot out of her palms. Then I notice; the ground around Luke is blackened and burning. Everywhere he steps, burns. The metal edges on the truck behind him glow with heat as they begin to melt and the rest of the destroyed vehicle bursts into flames.
“Don’t touch him! He’s hot,” I warn the team.
Glacier’s blue beams strike Luke in the chest and a gout of steam explodes off of him as his body heat fights the ice-beams.
“I didn’t think that was possible,” she says in open-mouthed unbelief.
“Believe it,” Luke growls. He leaps forward, through her beams, hand cocked back to strike her. I open my mouth to shout a warning but he’s too fast.
As his fist comes down on her, Carlos is there, taking the blow on his shield. The shockwave of the impact explodes like a bomb at their feet. Dirt and debris fly in every direction. When the dust settles, Luke and the Protector square off. Fleet grabs Monica a second after the impact and has her a safe distance away.
“Tony, Check on Lux!” I order him.
“On it.”
I can’t take my eyes off the titanic showdown in front of me. Luke, who doesn’t even look like himself now, with his monstrously deformed body that is more like a bodybuilders nightmare of deformed muscles on muscles, towers over Carlos.
Whatever happened to my best friend in the past, forged him into a fighting machine with enough cut muscles to make any muscle mag in the country beg for him to be on their cover. It didn’t make him taller, though.
Luke’s chest heaves as he stands back up from where the explosion of impacting force had knocked him down.
Amelia. A tank missile now could end this.
“What? Epic, it could kill Luke. I’m not about to do that.”
When he speaks, it's like the gates of hell itself open up. Heat pours out of his mouth in air shimmering waves.
“Child of Apollo, you’re not supposed to be here,” he says. Hi
s voice isn’t Luke’s.
Carlos cocks his head to one side, gripping his shield tight against his body and his spear behind him in a more relaxed hold.
“She tricked you. It’s how she wins,” Carlos says with a smile. “Get used to it.”
“Oh, I know all about her tricks. We shall see who tricked who,” he says with a lecherous grin. I know Carlos is about to say something but Luke backhands him. To both our amazement, Carlos ducks under it and kicks Luke in the stomach. The blow knocks Luke back a few feet. Carlos comes at him with the spear and Luke bats it aside, slamming into Carlos shield with his other hand.
Carlos spins around, bringing his shield in a backhand that crashes into Luke’s face and elicits a howl of rage from him.
The two punch, counter, and parry in a blur of motion that is almost impossible to follow. Each hit punctuated by a clap of air or shockwave as they wield titanic force.
“Amelia, I’m still down inside the base going through every nook and cranny with Milton. Do you need me up there?” Kate asks.
“No. It’s Luke, Kate, he killed the Armory. He and Carlos are duking it out.” When she doesn’t respond, I check to see if the equipment is working. In a pop of air, Kate appears next to me.
“Maybe I can reach him,” she says with a shrug. “I’ve been trying since he left but I can’t feel him. If I can see him, or touch him, though, I might be able to get through.”
Another shockwave of air rolls over us as Luke’s fist is suddenly stopped on Carlos’ shield.
“You think you can get close enough?” I ask her.
“Amelia, Lux is hurt bad. Teddy thinks she needs immediate evac,” Fleet says, I can hear the pain in his voice. He’s talking so fast it takes me a second to catch up.
“Do it. We got this.”
“Are you sure?” he asks.
“If we don’t, I don’t think you’ll make a difference,” I tell him matter-of-factually.
“Understood. I’m getting her out of here.”
Carlos ducks another blow by Luke and comes under him, striking his jaw with the edge of Aegis. The blow lift Luke off the ground and sends him flying to land in a furrow twenty feet away.
Full Metal Superhero (Book 6): Explosive Arsenal Page 8