by Lee, Tristan
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Peter says. “I think you’re kickass and all, but I mean, Lester, you’re sort of cray-cray.”
“Close your eyes and count to three, then open them again,” Lester says. “Have fun.”
Peter complies and closes his eyes. Afraid that he’s going to count too fast, the fastest man in the galaxy counts to ten before opening his eyes. Instead of the pitch black tunnel, he is now inside a large hangar occupied by several Aotiuer fighters and their accompanying flies and drones. All of them, however, are completely frozen.
“You count slowly,” Lester comments.
“This hangar would be our ideal entry point,” Dr. Invictus explains. “You’re going to be acting on the objective that you’ll have when we actually attack the capital ship.”
“Fuego,” Fastball says, “what am I doing, anyway?”
“All of us are going to have to get to Gi-Chul, who is in the bridge. On your way there, you have the job of shutting down all the fighters and cruisers from this capital ship.”
“How do I do that?”
“There’s a central control unit for all the fighters and cruisers; that’s why when you crashed that cruiser all of the fighters in Haven just dropped. Take it out and then go for the bridge. All of these locations are purely hypothetical, of course. On three and everyone unfreezes. Three!”
A drone lets out a screech as it sees Fastball, who takes off at full speed. He takes down the drones and flies by punching or kicking them while moving at Mach 10, far too fast for them to defend themselves.
“Too easy,” Fastball comments as he sprints out of the hangar. He does not need to go through the vents since he does not need to maintain stealth. Instead, he just runs straight at a wall and bursts through it onto the other side.
“Owl, where’s the control thing?” Fastball asks.
“Left.”
Fastball starts running again, complying with Lester’s directions. Since Fastball is so fast, Lester has to give his instructions far before Fastball actually gets to the said intersection.
“Right. Right again. Duck.”
Without asking, Fastball drops to the floor and slides, avoiding the bruiser firing squad that had opened fire. He can see how slowly their green energy blasts travel through the air as he slides, but finally he collides with a bruiser and takes its legs off with him before doing a flip to get on his feet.
“Disgusting,” Fastball says, dropping the bruiser’s legs. He takes off down the metal-plated halls until he reaches the door to the control unit. The other bruisers can be heard stomping down the halls, pursuing him.
“How am I supposed to open this door?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” Lester says. “Use your brain.”
“Can I die in this thing?”
“No, but if you’re going to do something stupid, it might hurt a lot.”
“Good to know.”
Fastball places his hands on the heavy, metal door and takes a deep breath. Then he starts to make his hands vibrate, slowly at first, but then faster and faster until he’s reached his top speed. In addition to vibrating his hands, Fastball applies a steady, yet forceful push against the door. Finally, the door cannot handle the force being applied to it and the locking mechanisms give way, sending the door soaring into the room it protected.
The fastest man in the galaxy dashes inside the room just in time to avoid the bruisers, expecting to find the central control unit, but instead the entire room is covered in C4s and plastique explosives, their timers counting down from two seconds. He turns to sprint away, but the bruisers have sealed the door.
“Fuck,” Fastball says as the last millisecond passes and the entire room explodes. The pain is excruciating; he is still moving faster than the explosion, so as the fire and shrapnel tears through his bones and muscle and tissue, he can feel all of it.
Peter sits up, breathing hard. The simulation has reverted back into the cavernous tunnel again. He pats himself down, making sure that he’s all still there before standing up and rubbing his head.
“How’d I do?” Peter asks.
“Meh. In most categories you scored exceptionally well, but you didn’t destroy the central control unit, nor did you find Gi-Chul,” Lester says. “Also, you ended up dead, so I wouldn’t say you passed with flying marks.”
“Shit, I’m going to have to do that again, aren’t I?” Peter asks.
“Until you get it right,” Lester says apologetically. “And it’ll change every time. We won’t have to work on your time, though. Your run took all of twenty-three seconds.”
As Peter enters the box, Dick leaves and takes his teammate’s place in the tunnel. His simulation starts shortly. Instead of placing him in the hangar, Defender finds himself inside one of the halls, staring down another three-bruiser firing squad. He gets his shield up just in time to deflect the lethal hail of green orbs, each one dispersing like a gas when it hits his shield.
“You’re going straight for Gi-Chul, got it?” Lester asks.
“Yeah, I got it.”
Defender moves forward at a turtle’s pace so he can continue to protect himself until he reaches the Aotiuer. He suddenly springs up from his crouches position and uses his shield as a deadly bludgeoning tool, bashing two of the bruisers in the face at once and retracting his shield so he can fire his grappling hook at the last one, who flees. The hook snags on the bruiser’s shoulder and yanks it back to Defender.
“Your kind are ugly shits, you know that?” Defender asks, his fist poised to strike.
He is about to when he feels a sharp pain in his gut. He looks down to see that the bruiser has stabbed him in the stomach. It rips the hook out of its shoulder and kicks Defender to the ground. The supersoldier rips the knife out and is about to put it to use against the bruiser when he is knocked back to the ground by the bruiser, who strikes him with the butt of its gun.
The blow concusses Defender so badly that the world spins and he drops the knife. Once Defender is on the ground again, the bruiser brings the butt of the gun down over and over in brutal overhead blows that eventually cave in Defender’s head, leaving nothing more than the gelatinous globs of his brain with the occasional chunk of bone lying in the blood-drenched area that his head used to occupy.
“That was shit,” Dick says, massaging his head.
“No offense intended, but I agree,” Lester says. “Two minutes, fifty-four seconds. Most of that was you crawling down the hall.”
“Since when were bruisers that good?” Dick asks.
“Since when were you so sloppy?” Lester counters. “You got careless; you could have taken out all three of them with your gun before you were even halfway down the hall, but instead you wanted to take them out with your hands. And you could have just killed that one that you taunted with your shield, but you just had to make a point of mocking it.”
“I’m going to have one hell of a headache,” Dick groans.
“Walk it off,” Lester says. “Next!”
Out of all the Invincibles, Defender and Fastball were the only ones to fail their objectives. Dr. Invictus successfully overrode the Aotiuer communications network, Owlman eliminated the weapons deck, Ronin shut down the power to the capital ship’s shields, and Demoness and Titan tore their way through the quarters, devastating most of the Aotiuer forces.
Their fights with Gi-Chul varied in success, however. Owlman killed him, but it resulted in his own death. Dr. Invictus was destroyed before he could finish the job, leaving the Aotiuer commander mortally wounded. Ronin defeated him and without any personal harm, but by that time the Aotiuer fleet had reached Earth. Demoness and Titan were by far the most efficient in taking down the simulated Gi-Chul; he was dead in a little more than thirty minutes and neither of them were injured, but that might stem from it being two against one. The duo tackled the simulation together because all of the Invincibles agreed on how unlikely it would be for them to not be together.
“Is Kaiju
going to try this thing?” Dick asks, wiping the sweat off of his brow after his successful fourth attempt.
“He already has,” Lester says.
“When?” Peter asks. “I haven’t seen the giant.”
Kaiju appears suddenly, making Belle yelp.
“I was microscopic,” Kaiju says. “My apologies, Belle Drake.”
“It’s okay, I just had a minor heart attack,” Belle says, one hand over her heart.
“What is his task?” Frank asks.
“Classified,” Sandor says, “need-to-know basis only.”
“Isn’t everything we do classified?” Belle asks.
“This is more classified,” Sandor clarifies.
“What’s more classified about a bunch of superheroes crossing the solar system to take on an alien fleet?” Belle counters.
“The point is, I’m not going to tell you,” Sandor says. “That’s final.”
“No fun,” Belle mutters as she walks away to find her husband.
Boarding
October 1st
The Invincibles are in their rooms, donning their field uniforms. They have run the simulation at every waking hour, stopping only to eat and sleep, for nearly a month. Every one of them knows the layout of the simulated ship like the layout of their own houses, but that knowledge might prove to be useless when they raid the actual capital ship. Today, the Invincibles will fly the Falcon through the wormhole generator and attempt to stop the Aotiuer threat for good.
They stand outside in Lester’s huge backyard, in awe of wormhole generator. It is a chrome-colored ring that has the diameter of a Boeing 777, but has a tiny base that is only the size of a golf cart. The generator has been started and displays a large, silver plate of metal in the inside of the ring.
“We’re in luck,” Dr. Invictus says. “There’s a wormhole that will deposit us three hundred feet in front of the first capital ship.”
“Won’t we crash into it?” Demoness asks.
“Not if Defender and I pull up very fast,” Dr. Invictus says. “When we pull up, we’re eventually going to pass one of those rings, at that point, they will detect us and we will lose most of our advantage of surprise, if we ever had one.”
“How long do we have?” Owlman asks.
“Assuming that the lack of air resistance doesn’t affect our speed too much, we should have about thirty seconds before we’re detected,” Dr. Invictus says. “Ronin, in those thirty seconds, you need to lock onto which capital ship Gi-Chul is in. Can you do that?”
Ronin nods once.
“You all know your objectives, correct?” Sandor asks them. “Good. Now does anyone have any final preparations to make before we leave?
“Not anymore,” Defender says, joining the group with his sister’s crossbow slung over his shoulder. “If anyone is going to finish off Gi-Chul, it’s going to be Anna.”
“Then I think it’s time to tell you all about the complication,” Sandor says once the Invincibles have boarded the Falcon. “Dr. Invictus discovered a fault in the generator.”
“It’s nothing immediately dangerous,” Dr. Invictus says as he straps himself into the pilot seat. “It’s just that since the generator is so big, the connection between Earth and the wormhole we’re trying to exit is relatively weak. Think of it like blowing up a balloon; stretch the material too much, and it will pop.”
“What are you trying to say?” Owlman asks uncertainly.
“I’m saying that it’s possible for the portal created by the generator to collapse,” Dr. Invictus says bluntly. “It should be strong enough to get us through, but depending on how long it takes us to defeat the Aotiuer . . .”
“Do you know what would happen if the portal did collapse?”
“Owl, I honestly don’t know,” Dr. Invictus says. “No one has ever attempted an interplanetary jump before, much less an interplanetary jump inside a fighter jet with seven people and an alien. All of this is just speculation.”
“But what do you think would happen?” Owlman asks, pushing the subject.
“Remember, this is just speculation. If it collapses before we get through, then we’ll be trapped on the other side of the solar system. If we’re back on Earth when it collapses, then I think that it might just cut off that particular wormhole.”
“And if we’re part of the way through?”
“This I know for sure; the portal closing will slice the Falcon directly at the point it crosses between our world and the Kuiper Belt. I’m not sure what would happen to the other half. Actually, it’s highly possible that since the Falcon and all of its occupants are ripping through the fabric of our universe to get to the fleet and are thus breaking up the laws of space and time and conservation of matter the half not on Earth could get stuck in some other dimension. Whoever is on that side would be trapped in a sub-universe in which this reality’s laws of time and space are no longer relevant as you drift among the remnants of those who tried and failed to shatter the walls of this dimension forever.”
“That’s the most terrifying thing I’ve heard in my life and we’re about to go attack like, a billion aliens,” Fastball says. “What the hell, doc?”
The Mechanical Man shrugs, “I don’t know. Maybe that’ll happen, maybe you’ll find yourself in a dimension that is completely parallel to ours. Samuel Gideon proved a long time ago that there are infinite dimensions that run in varying degrees of parallelism to ours, so who knows which one you might end up in? The sub-universe I was hypothesizing about is the most likely dimension that you’ll find yourself in, but I might be completely wrong. You might not even get sucked into another dimension; you might just get left behind on the other side of the solar system. And there’s the omnipresent chance that you’ll die. Or maybe your body simply won’t be able to handle the stress of having the link to origin in the universe cut off and you’ll melt away into the fabric of time and space, as if you never existed in the first place.”
“So if the portal closes before all of us are through, whoever isn’t on Earth is going to get frackity-whacked up big time,” Demoness summarizes.
“I’m not really sure what that means, but essentially, yes,” Dr. Invictus agrees.
“Well on that happy note,” Owlman says. “Is there anyone who wants to get off?”
None of the Invincibles do. Sandor claps the closest Invincible to him, Ronin, on the back, “This is it, people,” Sandor says. “This is the moment that we’ve all been waiting for.”
“It would be a lot more encouraging if you gave us some kind of advice or something,” Defender says. “Even telling us that you believe in us would be good enough.”
“Good luck,” Sandor says simply before exiting the Falcon.
“That was such an inspiring speech,” Fastball says.
The Invincibles let out the same nervous titters of laughter that they loosed before the battle in Haven City. This entire plan had seemed somewhat surreal to all of them up until now; a vague hope that together, they would stop the Aotiuer from ever threatening them again. But now, sitting in the Falcon, it begins to dawn on the Invincibles that their plan is happening. They have run the simulation countless times, each time with some new complication, but there will undoubtedly be some situation that they had never thought up.
“Alright, Gi-Chul,” Defender mutters. “Ready or not, here we come.”
Flying through the portal is somewhat anticlimactic, there is no bright light, or sudden rush of stars. Instead, it is like walking through a doorway. Nothing spectacular, other than the fact that they have crossed millions upon millions of miles in less than a minute. Just as predicted, they nearly slam into the side of a capital ship. Dr. Invictus and Defender pull the nose up just in time to avoid a head on collision, but not before some of the plates on the bottom of the Falcon are shredded off.
“Ronin! Can you find him?” Dr. Invictus asks.
Ronin has two fingers to his temple and his eyes are glowing blue, “No, give me more time.”
<
br /> Inside his private quarters near the bridge of one of the capital ships, Gi-Chul is sitting on the floor, meditating. The supreme commander of the Aotiuer forces opens his blue eyes.
“They have come,” he says before rising and picking up his staff, on his way to the bridge.
“They’re onto us,” Owlman says. “Six fighters inbound, starboard side!”
“Ronin, we need a location!” Dr. Invictus says urgently.
“Maybe I could focus better and find him faster if everyone would stop talking to me,” Ronin suggests.
“Damn, he’s salty,” Fastball says.
“Six more, coming up from the leeward,” Owlman reports. “They’ve got us flanked.”
“I’ll get some of them off of our tail,” Titan says, unbuckling his seat.
He leaves the cabin and seals the doors behind him so none of his teammates are sucked out into the vacuum of space. The Falcon has four sets of doors; the bay doors at the rear for cargo loads and HALO jumps, the doors that seal off the cargo bay from the middle section of the Falcon, where soldiers would check their gear prior to a jump or drop, the doors that block the previously described area off from the cabin, and the main boarding door. Of all the doors, the doors that seal the cabin are the most heavily armored, followed by the doors that seal off the cargo bay from the troop deck.
The Invincibles see the Prince of Xor soaring past their viewport with six of the twelve pursuers following him. Although he was overwhelmed in his previous visit to the fleet, this time Titan proves to be more than a match for the Aotiuer fighters. Now, not only can he outfly them, but he uses his strength and momentum to punch holes in their hulls as if the alien metal was paper. He flashes a smile at his teammates as he loops around in front of them to get to their six remaining pursuers.
A cruiser peels away from the rest of the fleet, but instead of helping its smaller allies in the pursuit of the Invincibles, it begins to circle the capital ships, forcing the Invincibles to pull farther away from it.
“Shit,” Defender says when he sees it.
“Ronin, we really need a location,” Dr. Invictus urges.