by David Reiss
Even if I managed to guide this battle into the tunnels, there were only forty feet of solid stone protecting the city above. Real estate values in downtown Chicago, I thought, were about to become volatile.
◊◊◊
From: Cherenkov
To: BlueEyedGirl
Subject: Serious question
Hey, I’ve been thinking…You said your brother isn’t a hero. Is he some sort of government agent? Like, secret James Bond stuff?
From: BlueEyedGirl
To: Cherenkov
Subject: Re: Serious question
I don’t want to answer any questions about that. Oh! I saw that you and Exbow stopped a robbery on your last patrol. Congratulations! No video this time, though. :(
From: Cherenkov
To: BlueEyedGirl
Subject: Re: Re: Serious question
Yeah, some jerks were holding up a liquor store while we were right outside. I miss the cameradrone too, but Majestic says I can’t bring it. :/ Look, I’m not trying to break your brother’s cover, I just need some help. He’s with the Department of Metahuman Affairs, right?
From: BlueEyedGirl
To: Cherenkov
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Serious question
What sort of help do you need?
From: Cherenkov
To: BlueEyedGirl
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Serious question
Can he find out who MID-01483775-22 is?
From: BlueEyedGirl
To: Cherenkov
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Serious question
That’s Cloner’s original license number from before he retired; he has a new ID now. What’s going on?
From: Cherenkov
To: BlueEyedGirl
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Serious question
I think I’m in trouble.
◊◊◊
There was blood in my mouth, coppery and sweet; even through the orichalcum breastplate, I’d felt that first blow. Honestly, I was impressed! I’d studied footage of Imperator Rex’s past fights, but this was the first time that we’d come to blows. The forces involved were greater even than I’d anticipated, though I’d now readied myself. Balanced and stable, I began work recalibrating my armor’s inertial dampening field.
Imperator Rex darted forward—arm cocked for a haymaker—and I simply shot the ground out from under him with a blast from my scepter; he stumbled forward into a straight left punch. It was a solid hit, delivered with enough force that it might have stopped a moving car. Glassware in the kitchen shattered from the shockwave alone, yet the slim villain rocked back—unhurt. I managed to get in another quick jab before he recovered, and he retaliated by grabbing my wrist and swinging me once more into the wall, face-first. Reflexively, I dismissed my scepter back into its subspace storage so that both my hands were now free.
The physics of this were all wrong; my opponent lacked the mass necessary to be the fulcrum for such a move. For that matter, the speed with which he rocketed forward was greater than could have been managed if it were mere friction that held his feet to the ground. There were other forces at work, forces that I hadn’t accounted for. My microdrones were ordered to take careful readings; I’d failed to accurately map his powers and was now paying the price.
No matter. Imperator Rex had failed to understand the resiliency of the Mk 36b, as well as that of the man within. In the moment after my faceplate struck stone, he relaxed his grip on my wrist.
I took advantage, triggering my flight systems to right myself and triggered a pre-programmed Wing-Tsun centerline punch and a simultaneous low front-kick to my opponent’s knee. The experienced brawler negated the first attack but not the latter, and I capitalized by transitioning into a hooking blow to his floating ribs when he dropped his guard.
Imperator Rex darted back so quickly that he may as well have teleported.
I didn’t bother re-summoning my scepter; the blasters built into the MK 36b weren’t as powerful, but they were fast. I alternated plasma bolts from each hand, grand flashes of heat and light that crashed over Imperator Rex like a tidal wave. He raised both hands in a boxing guard to protect his face, leaning into the onslaught. The room behind him glowed with heat, fire spreading in a roar, but the Chicago-based supervillain just spat some blood from his lips and returned to the offensive.
I had, at least, managed to wipe that smug smile from his lips. He looked furious.
The Mk 36b’s defenses were not as powerful as those of the Mk 35 heavy-combat armor, but I knew that I could take a fairly significant pounding. When Imperator Rex closed to throw immensely powerful hooks, I ignored him and chose instead to spray the living area with massive concussive blasts. His television? Vaporized. The kitchen? Rendered into shrapnel. I laughed and he cursed, his punches getting more and more wild.
I re-summoned the scepter and pressed the pommel against his chest. Imperator Rex had just enough time to widen his eyes before a massive kinetic-energy blast sparked and blew him up into the ceiling. When he struck bedrock, the earth shook.
◊◊◊
From: BlueEyedGirl
To: Cherenkov
Subject: Trouble?
Oh no! What’s going on? How can I help?
From: Cherenkov
To: BlueEyedGirl
Subject: Re: Trouble?
I was updating some of my paperwork for my hero licensing thing, and I noticed some papers I didn’t recognize. They got tossed in my folder because Cloner’s old number was invalid, I guess. It was Cloner’s memo, when he recommended me to Junior Shield, but it’s not the memo that I saw. This is crazy, I have to get out of here. I’ll send another message when I get home.
From: BlueEyedGirl
To: Cherenkov
Subject: Re: Re: Trouble?
Ok, I’ll be waiting!
From: Cherenkov
To: BlueEyedGirl
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Trouble?
I think Cloner is involved in something shady, and I think he’s planning on using me as part of his plan. I can’t really make sense of this. If I get this to your brother, can he have the D.M.A. investigate? Maybe it’s nothing, I don’t know. But this is really freaking me out.
From: BlueEyedGirl
To: Cherenkov
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Trouble?
Um. Ok, send me what you have. I’ll make sure my brother looks into this.
◊◊◊
Both of us were hurting; fortunately, my armors all include a plethora of onboard medications, and I could use my neural tap to completely turn off most forms of physical pain. The sheer volume of medical alerts popping up, however, was daunting. Internal bleeding, broken ribs, muscle damage, concussion…my medical nanites were, once more, going to be working overtime after I finished punishing Imperator Rex for his hubris.
“Surrender,” I growled. “I’ll take the Ancient’s artifacts, but you can keep your city and your miserable life.”
“Screw you, tin man,” he panted, grinning maliciously. “I’m just getting warmed up.”
We traded blows quickly and strategically, a high-speed pugilistic chess-match. Imperator Rex was more physically powerful than I’d expected and had kept up his skills remarkably well for a man who’d been in hiding for so long. It was no wonder that he’d earned so terrifying a reputation; he would likely have been victorious over the Doctor Fid of seven years earlier. This battle, however, had already been decided. He was tiring, and the Mk 36b had sufficient power to continue for days. Furthermore, my combat algorithms had been studying his fighting style. If I wished, I could take a nap and let my armor’s programming fight with my body as a passenger without any loss in effectiveness. The end result was inevitable.
Despite my initial worries that we would turn downtown Chicago into a warzone, the battle had remained primarily contained in the main chamber and the into the tunnels; Imperator Rex hadn’t tried to bring the fight to the surface lest his freedom be revealed to the public. I was
happy to oblige; my ability to fly in the open air might have been advantageous, but maintaining plausible deniability was an issue for me as well. And so, in narrow confines, we battered each other and left shattered stone in our wake.
“Time has passed you by,” I mocked. “It’s sad to see that you’ve come to this. You’ve spent far, far too long as shadow king of your little empire.”
“And you’ve spent too long playing hero,” he sneered. “You’ve forgotten the first rule about fightin’ like a villain.”
“And what might that be?” I asked, summoning my scepter to my hand once more.
“If the game ain’t playing out the way you want,” he grinned and tore the charm from his necklace, “cheat!”
A massive warhammer of wrought iron and aged ashwood appeared in his hands; a hero named Viking had borne such a weapon for a brief career with the California-based Paragons. From what information I’d hacked from their records, the hammer granted a massive increase in strength and energy to the wielder in exchange for a portion of the wielder’s life. Imperator Rex would age a year for every minute that this battle continued…however long that turned out to be.
He shot forward and I brought up my scepter to deflect his swing, to no avail. The scepter’s haft—framed in orichalcum and reinforced with a structural integrity field—fractured in my hand; shards sprayed around me, embedding into solid stone as easily as if the walls were made of wet clay. I reflexively retreated half a step, which was the only thing that saved my life when his backhand swing sliced through the air where my head had been only a fraction of a second earlier.
This fight, I realized with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, could have been over before Imperator Rex had aged a month.
I fled deeper into the tunnels and Imperator Rex tore after me, mad laughter trailing in his wake.
He swung at me twice more, gouging great divots out of the tunnel walls when I successfully dodged. There would be no surviving a direct hit. Even if the thicker orichalcum breastplate withstood the damage, the Mk 36b’s inertial dampening system was insufficient and I would be shaken into paste within the armor. My only advantage was the darkness and that microdrones had mapped this section of tunnel well enough that I could keep ahead of the monstrously strong, hammer swinging supervillain.
Every strike that missed me demolished a section of wall. The shockwaves were visible, gravel and debris quaking along the tunnel floor, and no doubt shook the the city forty feet above. And then we came to a dead end and he paused, savoring the moment.
“You had a good run, tin man,” he gloated, “but it ends now. You shouldn’t have come to my town.”
This was the villain who had terrified a nation. This, now, was the Imperator Rex of old. But I was Doctor Fid, and he had me trapped exactly where I wanted him.
“And you shouldn’t have said anything about my family,” I growled in return.
He smirked and drew back the great warhammer for one final blow, but I was faster: with both hands, I aimed a massive kinetic-energy blast at the wall to his left. For a moment he looked amused that I had missed, and I thought that I’d made a mistake in my calculations. And then the dam cracked, and Lake Michigan flooded into the tunnel in an icy deluge. The wall of water struck with the force of an oncoming train and the inevitability of an avalanche.
I hadn’t forgotten the first rule, after all.
Surprise cost him his grip on his glowing hammer and also his only source of light; I dimmed my armor and, navigating by sonar, shot forward to catch his ankle and keep him from running. We were flushed into a second chamber and in a fraction of a second, we were both of us submerged. The Mk 36b had an enclosed recirculating air supply that could survive the vacuum of space. Imperator Rex was not so lucky.
From the moment our battle had begun, I’d been studying his power; Imperator Rex was a powerhouse who was physically stronger even than Titan, but strength alone hadn’t been able to explain the force of his blows nor the speed with which he moved. There’d been a telekinetic aspect to his metahuman abilities, a kinetic energy multiplying field limited to affect only the surface of a solid object that he touched. With a punch, he could thrust more power into the blow at the moment of impact. When he ran, he could push off the ground with more force than raw strength would allow.
Floating in blackness, however, there was no direct contact with a solid surface for him to influence.
He struggled and kicked, a flailing ogre with monstrous strength. I let him go, then caught him again and spun him in place. According to my research, many people drown only feet from the water’s surface because they become disoriented and swim in the wrong direction. I witnessed that now. The frantic supervillain’s fingers found the floor and he dug at it, carving out handfuls of concrete and stone in search of air. In that cold inky blackness, I floated just out of his reach, poking and tugging to keep Imperator Rex disoriented as his last breath slowly deserted him.
He’d fought the most powerful heroes in human history and lived to tell the tale. He’d clawed his way into legend, earned respect akin to that of a monarch among criminals. For a brief, shining moment he’d thought that he’d managed to bring low even the infamous Doctor Fid! And in an instant, the light faded. He was blind and helpless, eyes wide and lips pulled back in a panicked, desperate snarl.
He could sense my eyes upon him, I was sure. He knew that I was right there—right out of reach—but he didn’t beg; it wasn’t in his nature. To the very end, Imperator Rex swung punches at nothing, grasped at empty water, fought for every last second.
Until finally…horribly…he went still.
I could have saved him, I knew. I could have grabbed him and cruised back to a clear section of tunnel and performed CPR. Weakened and beaten, he wouldn’t have been able to resist as I dragged him to the appropriate authorities. The Red Ghost would smile approvingly, and (once his treatment had been successful) even Titan would grudgingly offer his respect. I could be a hero in truth instead of play acting. The option was painfully tempting; Bobby’s spirit would finally have been able to look down upon his big brother with pride.
But Doctor Fid wasn’t a hero. Doctor Fid wasn’t worthy.
I weighed the corpse down with a massive hunk of concrete, then navigated my way back through the dark, silent tunnels to take ownership of Imperator Rex’s hoard before flooding damaged any of my plunder.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
"This just in," the news program anchor graveled; he was one of the old guard, a grizzled reporter who’d been associated with the network for so long that his name was synonymous with the nightly news. “One of Chicago’s oldest and most historic theaters has been closed due to damage to its foundation, possibly related to the city’s flooded access tunnels. The investigation continues…”
I remembered watching this reporter, long ago, reporting on a hostage situation in South America. He took risks to get dramatic camera angles as he explained the situation, but his voice was serious and calming. When the shooting had begun, he’d continued his report—giving an honest blow-by-blow report as soldiers rushed the terrorist’s stronghold. With earnest fervor, he’d relayed the dangers that the hostages faced and the heroism of the rescuers. He’d projected a bearing of confidence throughout the entire ordeal, an aura of absolute certainty that the soldiers were performing the right actions for the right reasons. When the first rescuees were escorted from the airport, it had felt like a triumph of righteousness over the forces of evil.
There were still hints of that remembered gravitas in the anchor’s voice, but there was now a disappointing practiced aspect to his delivery. I suspected that he would display the same solemn fervor when delivering a pleasant weather report as he would when announcing a political assassination.
The damage to Chicago’s Loop district had been less severe than I’d worried; after the Great Chicago Flood a few decades back, floodgates and water-tight hatches had been installed and updated. A small handful of bus
inesses had flooded basements or had power interrupted but the effects had not been widespread. Imperator Rex’s body had yet to be discovered, so this was being reported as a casualty-free incident.
“It’s still unknown what caused this near-catastrophe,” the news anchor intoned, “but authorities have confirmed that there is evidence of metahuman involvement. The investigation continues, leaving the city to wonder if this was a one-time event or if it was merely the first stage in some greater plo-”.
I grumbled in soft complaint and turned off the television. Water damage had destroyed much of the evidence, but the destruction Imperator Rex had wrought had been severe enough to leave indelible signs. The clues would be followed, and the body found within days.
There was no surviving evidence that would link the death to Doctor Fid, I was reasonably certain. Even so…the world would discover that a murder had occurred.
I’d spent four hours floating in a nutrient bath while my medical nanites performed their repairs, but I was not yet ready to rest. In the kitchen, I gathered up a few essentials for a long night of research at one of my remote laboratories: fruit, caffeine-laden sodas, frozen pizza; in silence, I packed it all in a small bag.
“You’re leaving?” Whisper asked, quietly. I hadn’t heard her approach.
“Just for the night,” I forced a comforting smile. “You and Nyx have the house to yourselves.”