Action Figures - Issue One: Secret Origins

by Michael Bailey

  “The Protectorate was busy so we’re covering this one,” I say. I know, I’m not authorized to namedrop, but if these guys think we’re with the Protectorate they might...look at me like they have no idea what I’m talking about?

  “The Protectorate?” Archimedes says. “No. No, that’s not right.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s not right: the killer funk you slobs are generating,” Stuart says, sliding past me. “I’m opening a window before we all pass out.”

  “What you think is beside the point,” I say. Act like you’re in control, Carrie. Perception is reality. “We know that battlesuit is yours.”

  “But it isn’t,” Archimedes says. “I stole it.”

  “From ARC.”

  “No, not from ARC.” He chuckles. “That suit is light-years beyond anything ARC could create.”

  “Then who?”

  There’s sharp pop and a tinkle of shattering glass and a deafening hiss, like someone has set the air itself on fire, and I duck a split-instant before an airborne Stuart takes me out.

  Archimedes power-rolls off his bed and joins me on the floor. “Ah,” he says. “I believe that would be who I was expecting.”

  Missy practically teleports into my arms. “There’s someone outside!”

  “We’re on the second floor,” I say.

  “He’s flying! Like you! Except not like you because you get all glowy and he’s wearing a scary suit with wings!”

  I hope those wings make him a bigger target, because no way am I sticking my head up to check exactly where he is. If his weapon can flatten Stuart so easily...

  I jump up and let him have it with both barrels—or hands, as the case may be. I’m firing blind but the metallic bang tells me I connect, and the crash of metal on asphalt confirms it. There’s nothing beyond the shattered window but open sky.

  Archimedes throws me over the bed and runs for the door, calling out to someone named Roger. By the time I get back to my feet both Archimedes and his friend are gone.

  I’m about to give chase when I catch sight of Matt curled on the floor in a fetal position, his arms wrapped around his head. He’s half underneath Stuart, whose entire chest is bright red, like he has a nasty sunburn, and it’s smoking, no lie, his chest is smoking, and then I remember there’s some winged armored guy outside who’s got to be in a seriously foul mood.

  Dammit, there’s too much going on. I don’t know what to do. What do I do?

  “Carrie?” Sara says, peeking over the edge of the bed.

  “Check on Stuart and Matt,” I say, moving toward the hole that was once a window, “do what you have to for them, then go after Archimedes, you and Missy.”

  “What about you?” Missy says.

  Our attacker is down (on the ground, specifically) but not out. His battlesuit has wings like Missy said, batwings made of metal. The helmet makes me think of a lion’s skull because of its golden-brown mane, and he’s lying on top of a segmented scorpion tail attached to the back somewhere. His suit is made to intimidate.

  “You’re dead, you lousy little—” he says, his voice cold and synthesized, and the tip of his tail emits a piercing whine. I drop as a corkscrewing energy blast punches a hole in the ceiling above me. It’s not exactly right to call it an explosion, but chunks of stucco and wood and concrete spray me as though a grenade went off on the roof.

  And then I do what any sane person would do in a situation like this: I jump out the window.

  FIFTEEN

  Energy blasts pour out of me like machine-gun fire, something I’ve never done before, but I’m not complaining; half my shots miss and chew up the parking lot, but the rest connect, and lion-scorpion-bat guy is screaming bloody murder at me.

  I ease up, mostly because I’m afraid I might kill the man if I don’t. His armor looks intact but he’s going to need a million dollars’ worth of bodywork.

  “I have a lot more where that came from,” I say, my voice trembling, “so don’t try anything funny.”

  “Sweetheart,” he says as he struggles to stand, “you have no idea who you’re screwing with.”

  “Neither do you.”

  “Heh. True enough. The name’s Manticore.”

  Vaguely familiar, but I’m not placing it. “Lightstorm. Pleasure’s all yours.” That’s right, pal, I’m bad.

  “Not yet it isn’t,” Manticore says.

  There’s no whine this time, no warm-up before the pitch, and he nearly tags me. The tail snaps up over his head and spits a beam at me, short and sweet, not the same killer zap as before, but what it lacks in quality, Manticore makes up for in quantity. Rapid-fire blasts chase me across the parking lot before I remember, hey, there’s a whole sky above me.

  Don’t judge. I’m not fleeing. I’m not escaping. I’m staging a strategic withdrawal. I’m retreating so I can regroup.

  Manticore is not on board with this plan. A bolt sizzles past me. Manticore is coming up on me fast, his steely wings at full extension, his tail arced up over his back and lobbing hot death my way.

  I level off and floor it. Mach one comes and goes and for a few seconds Manticore falls behind, but then there’s a boom, like distant thunder, and he starts regaining lost ground. What’s powering that suit?

  Outrunning him now feels like a losing proposition so it’s time for Plan B. It takes me maybe a full second to loop around and come up behind him, and now he’s the target. I fire. He dodges. He screws up my brilliant plan by returning fire. I veer out of harm’s way. It’s a panic move on my part, and by the time I recover he’s coming at me from above, tail blazing, forcing me to make another clumsy evasive maneuver.

  I have badly underestimated this guy—or badly overestimated myself. Either way I’m in trouble because I’m clearly the amateur here. Manticore owns the sky. If I can’t get really brilliant really fast, he’s going to own me.

  So I let him.

  A volley comes way too close for comfort. It’s a near miss but I play it like a hit, complete with girly scream (I hate myself for that, but hey, that’s showbiz). I turn my power off and go into freefall. Manticore doesn’t follow. Soon he’s a dark dot against a backdrop of blue, and then he’s gone.

  I power back up once I start to see the details of a town below me coming into focus. Not a big town, not like Kingsport, more along the lines of a quaint little New England town that has bed and breakfasts instead of motels and mom-and-pop stores instead of Walmart. I touch down near a big old church, and I’m more than slightly stunned when I read the sign at the side of the road: Londonderry Presbyterian.

  As in: Londonderry, New Hampshire.

  I’m in freakin’ New Hampshire. Five minutes ago I was in Massachusetts.

  Oh, crap...how do I get back?

  “Carrie!” Missy cries out.

  “Lightstorm,” Matt grunts. “Use her super-hero name.”

  “Oh, God,” Sara says. She tries to roll Matt onto his back but he resists. “Are you okay?”

  “I took a Stuart to the face.”

  “Dude, I’m right here,” Stuart hisses. Sara resists touching a finger to the angry red welt splashed across his chest. “What hit me?”

  “I don’t know,” Missy says, casting an eye toward the shattered window, “but it sounds like Carrie’s wailing the crap out of him.”

  “Good. Tell her to save a piece for me,” Stuart says, forcing himself to sit up. “Ow.”

  “I’ve never heard you ow before,” Sara says.

  “Yeah, I don’t like it either.”

  Matt rolls onto his hands and knees, his breathing shallow and labored. “Where’s what’s-his-name?” he says. “Archimedes?”

  “Oh, crap,” Sara says, “we were supposed to go after him.”

  “He got away?”

  “He took off when—”

  “Never mind about us. Go get him.”

  “Matt, you’re hurt.”

  “I’m fine!” Matt says, convincing no one. “Get him before he gets away!”


  “More than he already has,” Stuart says. “I got this, you go.”

  Reluctantly, Sara and Missy step into the hallway and, each in her own way, pick up the scent.

  “That way,” they say over one another.

  Without comparing their hunches, they take off in pursuit. The trail leads down the hallway, down the stairs, and through the front lobby, where the desk clerk babbles excitedly into the phone about explosions and people shooting lasers at one another.

  “Where’s Car—Lightstorm?” Missy says when she does not spot said laser-shooter.

  “I don’t know,” Sara says distractedly as she reaches out with her superhuman senses, feeling for her quarry. “Come on.”

  Following their respective invisible trails, the girls sprint down the long motel driveway, down along a four-lane road that hums with rush hour traffic. Sara’s lungs burn, on the edge of collapse, but she can’t go back to her friends empty-handed. She can’t return as a failure. She can’t. She won’t.

  “There!” she huffs, pointing at two distant figures loping down the sidewalk ahead of them, struggling to maintain a fugitive’s pace.

  “I got ‘em!” Missy says and she races away, leaving Sara to wonder how much Missy was holding back—and how much more she’s capable of.

  Missy sails past her prey and skids to a halt, cutting off their escape route. “Stop right there! You’re coming with us!”

  Manfred makes a sour face at the diminutive figure in black and, with a dismissive shake of his head, throws a punch that misses its nimble target by a wide margin.

  “Could we not fight, please?” Missy says. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “You don’t want—?” Manfred pants. “Oh, for...”

  Manfred lunges and, again, misses, but succeeds in driving Missy into Archimedes’ waiting arms. He seizes the girl in a bear hug and lifts her off the ground. Before Manfred can capitalize, a force slams into him, hurling him backwards.

  Too hard, Sara thinks. Not that she feels bad about it.

  “RogYAAAAHH!” Archimedes yelps as fingernails as sharp as steak knives dig into his ribs. Missy squirms free and cocks a fist. “No! Please!” he squeals, throwing his hands out to ward off the blow. “Please don’t hurt me anymore, please...”

  “You going to give us any more trouble?” Sara says. Archimedes sinks to his knees to show his compliance.

  “You swear?” Missy says. “You swear you’re not trying to trick me?”

  “He’s not,” Sara says. “He’s terrified of you.”

  “He is?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Oh. Cool.”

  “You need to let me go,” Archimedes says.

  “After everything we went through to find you?” Sara says. “Fat frickin’ chance.”

  “That man, the man in the armor. Someone sent him to find me.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what he wants from me or who sent him,” Archimedes says. “I just want to get away from him. I’ll go back into hiding and I won’t cause any more trouble, I promise. I promise. Please.”

  Through the static of his fear, Sara senses the truth in his words, and for a moment she considers his plea—but only for a moment.

  “No. You’re coming with us.”

  “No,” Concorde says as he glowers down at heroes and fugitive alike, “you’re all coming with me.”

  SIXTEEN

  First, let me say this: New Hampshire is really pretty in the fall.

  Second, I’d like to give a big shout-out to whoever invented the GPS app for smartphones (and I’d like to kick myself for not thinking of that sooner).

  When I finally make it back to the motel, I find a scene uncomfortably reminiscent of our Main Street brawl, but on a smaller scale; the damage was confined to one motel room window (Manticore’s fault) and a small patch of parking lot—technically my fault but I’m shifting the blame to Manticore, who hasn’t shown his steel-plated face again. Maybe he saw that the big guns had arrived and is somewhere far, far away, gloating over my untimely demise.

  Concorde and Mindforce are there among the small army of cops, and Concorde goes absolutely ballistic when he finds out who we’d been tangling with. He screams us stupid for I don’t know how long, tells us to never mess with the guy again, if we ever see him call the Protectorate and then get the hell away, we’re all so damn lucky we got off as light as we did, et cetera.

  But Concorde isn’t chewing us out for the sake of it, like normal; he is seriously freaked out about this. Like, Mom and Dad just found out you smoked weed and drank beer before driving your little brother home in their car even though you have no license-level freaked.

  “Concorde and Manticore have a history,” Mindforce says in a way that tells me that will be the only explanation I get and I should not push it.

  I expect Concorde to send us on our way after his dressing-down, but instead he pushes us off to the side and says, “Don’t go anywhere.” So we go nowhere while he and Mindforce attend to whatever it is real super-heroes attend to after a fight. There’s a lot of talking to the police, to the EMTs checking on the other hotel guests, to the hotel manager and staff.

  I catch sight of Archimedes and Manfred sitting in the back of a police cruiser. Manfred is as miserable as you’d expect someone in the back of a police cruiser to be, but Archimedes, he looks—I don’t know. His face is utterly blank, like he’s in shock, until he happens to glance in my direction, and wow, if looks could kill Archimedes would be wiping out three generations of my family.

  Concorde and Mindforce return and pull them out of the cruiser. “Let’s go,” Concorde says, but he’s not talking to Archimedes and Manfred.

  We follow them around to the back of the motel, where I learn how non-flyer Mindforce gets around. The vehicle occupying an entire block of parking spaces makes me think of a military chopper if it had been designed by Apple. iCopter. In place of rotors there’s a wide flat disk, and when Mindforce starts it up it emits a hum like Concorde’s suit but on an arena concert scale. More of that—what did Matt call it?—maglev technology, I assume.

  The others pile in and the iCopter lifts off. Once it’s clear, Concorde powers up. “I hope you know how lucky you are,” he says. “Manticore should have killed you.”

  Not could have killed me; should have killed me.

  “I know,” I say. “He was better than me. A lot better. That’s why I played dead. I knew I couldn’t beat him.”

  I hate that I can’t see his face. Whatever he’s thinking about me, it’s his secret.

  “Hm,” is all he says.

  I guess when we got the HQ tour, Mindforce forgot to show us the small hangar at the back of the property where he parks the Pelican—so-named because it’s white, it flies, and it holds a lot of cargo. iCopter is a way cooler name.

  We parade Archimedes and Manfred into HQ and into a holding area in the basement, an off-white room with individual cells. They have Star Trek-style sliding doors and the same electronic controls as on the Protectorate’s secret subway. iJail.

  Concorde follows Manfred into one of the cells. “What’s going on here, Manfred?” Concorde says.

  “You know him?” Mindforce says.

  “Roger Manfred, head of Advanced Robotic Concepts’ artificial intelligence department. No one’s seen him or Ashe Semler for over a week,” he says with a nod toward the neighboring cell.

  “And no one will see Ashe Semler ever again,” Manfred says. “He’s gone.”

  “Explain,” Concorde says. “Now.”

  What Manfred says chills me to my soul. It’s crazy talk, a wild sci-fi tale about a sentient artificial intelligence that enters the real world by invading a man’s brain like a virus, erasing his memories and overwriting a new persona. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for Ashe Semler, to feel his very identity being eaten away and taken over by an invader and being helpless to stop it.

  It’s a totally irratio
nal reaction, but I really really want to break this guy’s face.

  Concorde’s hands are balled into fists. I think he shares the sentiment.

  In the medical bay, Matt is finally free to strip off his face mask. He has dried blood smeared across his face, the stain of a bloody nose.

  “It’s not broken,” Mindforce says, pressing his thumbs on either side of Matt’s nose, “and there’s no sign of a concussion.”

  “Go me,” Matt says, accepting an ice pack.

  “What happens now?” I ask.

  “What happens now is the five of you go home,” Mindforce says, and the dismissive edge in his voice catches me off-guard.

  “I meant with Archimedes.”

  “I know what you meant. That’s not your concern. We have a process and it doesn’t involve you.”

  “So that’s it?” Matt says. “We do the legwork and you guys get the credit?”

  “Dammit, Matt, this isn’t about—” Mindforce stops himself, takes a breath. “You need to understand something. Manticore isn’t just some tricked-out bank robber. He’s a hardcore mercenary, and if you’re standing between him and a paycheck, he will murder you, and it doesn’t matter that you’re a kid.”

  Mindforce conspicuously glances in my direction when he says that.

  “You’ve played your part. This is in our ballpark now,” he says. “You kids, go home.”

  Concorde herds us onto the secret subway thingy. He wants to make absolutely sure we do as we’re told for once. I half-expect him to walk each of us home and personally tuck us into bed.

  “Okay, so,” Matt says, “bit of an anti-climax, sure, but I think, all things considered, we did good.”

  No one rushes to agree with him.

  “C’mon. So we didn’t completely ace it right out of the gate, but there’re super-teams out there that’ve had worse debut adventures.”

  “Name one,” Stuart says.

  “There was a team from Detroit a few years back,” Matt says without missing a beat. “Called themselves the Gangbusters because they were going after all the street gangs. Said they were going to clean up the city.”